MELBOURNE, Australia – Storms packing powerful winds toppled trees, killed one person and knocked out power to 174,000 homes and businesses in eastern Australia, officials said Wednesday.
The wild weather hit large swathes of Victoria on Tuesday, dumping torrents of rain and unleashing gusts of more than 150 kilometers per hour, the state government and emergency services said.
A 50-year-old man was killed in the storm, dying on the scene after being struck by debris while working on his property in Darlimurla, southeast of Melbourne, Victoria police said in a statement.
The winds also fanned bushfires in the Grampians region west of Melbourne, burning an unknown number of homes in one small town, the state’s Country Fire Authority said.
At its peak, 530,000 homes and businesses lost power, the Australian Energy Market Operator said in an update.
About 174,000 were still cut off on Wednesday afternoon, it said.
“Given the extent of the widespread damage, it may take days if not weeks to restore electricity to all of those impacted,” the authority said.
The winds tore off roofs, uprooted trees and flattened electricity pylons, according to media reports and images shared on social media.
Fallen transmission towers led to the shutdown of Victoria’s largest electricity generator, the coal-powered Loy Yang A, which was being reconnected to the grid, the state’s energy authority said in a statement.
“This has been one of the largest outage events in the state’s history,” Victoria Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio said.
Lightning strikes ignited “multiple fires” in Victoria, said the state’s emergency management commissioner, Rick Nugent.
In the hard-hit Grampians region, flames incinerated “a number of residential homes” in Pomonal, home to a few hundred residents, Nugent told a news briefing.
It was too early to say how many homes were destroyed, state firefighters said, though a report in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper said about 20 had been lost.
Victorian authorities said they were working to restore power and ascertain the full extent of fire damage as bushfire and weather warnings were lowered across the state.