Tuesday’s powerful winds in Vic, resulted in power outages for more than 500,000 customers. According to Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio, this has been one of the largest outage events in the state’s history.
The wild weather brought down six transmission towers near Anakie, to the southwest of Melbourne on Tuesday afternoon. At the same time, the Loy Yang A power station was disconnected from the gird after it tripped.
The dangerous mix of destructive winds, extreme heat and thousands of lightning strikes causing damage to poles, wires and electrical infrastructure across parts of Vic on Tuesday.
Image: Damaged transmission towers at Anakie, Source: AAP
The burst of ferocious summer weather was caused by a strong cold front and pre-frontal trough passing over the state, which caused a cold air mass from the Southern Ocean to clash with a much warmer air mass sitting over Australia’s southeast.
Image: A squall line around 1,500 km in length causes lightning across parts of four states on Tuesday afternoon.
This volatile weather pattern caused powerful winds and severe thunderstorms, which produced:
- A wind gust of 130 km/h at Mount Gellibrand shortly before midday, which is equivalent to a category two tropical cyclone
- Wind gusts of 126 km/h at Yarram Airport, 122 km/h at Avalon Airport, 119 km/h at Eildon Fire Tower, 117 km/h at Swan Hill, 115 km/h at Fawkner Beacon and102 km/h at Melbourne Airport
- 543,762 lightning strikes within a 600 km radius of Melbourne between 9am and 9pm AEDT on Tuesday
- Dry lightning that ignited new fires amid Extreme to Catastrophic fire danger ratings
- A massive squall line, which resulted in thunderstorms stretching roughly 1,500 km across parts of Vic, NSW, SA and Tas
- Large hailstones falling from fast-moving severe storms
Crews are actively working to restore power quickly to thousands of customers on Tuesday, enduring challenging weather conditions and fallen trees to repair the powerlines and infrastructure. However, due to the scale of the event DEECA Victoria warns that it could take days, if not weeks tor restore power to all those impacted in Vic.
Image: Crew working to repair infrastructure, Source: AAP
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