SA: Wild weather causes widespread damage

AAP General News (Australia)
08-31-2005
SA: Wild weather causes widespread damage

By Lauren Ahwan

ADELAIDE, Aug 31 AAP - Wild winds uprooted trees and caused widespread blackouts in
Adelaide overnight, with the damage bill for South Australia's electricity transmission
system alone expected to top $1.5 million.

At the peak of last night's storm activity, about 50,000 homes were without power.

Local power company ETSA Utilities described the storms as "one of the most extensive
and extreme weather events" in its history.

It said maintenance crews worked throughout the night dealing with downed power lines,
with most services expected to be restored late today.

ETSA said the outages were caused by trees and falling branches and lightning, which
damaged more than 100 feeder lines.

"The greatest number of people affected was in the Adelaide metropolitan area, but
for a time the whole of Kangaroo Island was without power and there were other outages,
particularly in areas south of Adelaide," ETSA Utilities business relations general manager
Craig Cock said.

"Our crews worked in very difficult conditions to restore power first by working on
the feeder lines which supply large numbers of people then to multiple low voltage lines
and to lines serving single customers.

"In addition we gave the highest priority to public safety by dealing with live wires
which had been reported to ETSA Utilities by the public and by emergency services."

Adding further frustration to households, ETSA Utilities' automated call centre crashed,
meaning they could not advise they had lost their power.

Mr Cock said the problem was regrettable and would be fixed to ensure it did not happen again.

By mid-today, the State Emergency Service (SES) said it had responded to about 800
calls for help.

"It has been quite phenomenal," SES spokeswoman Judith Bleechmore said.

"The vast majority were for uprooted trees or trees crashing and branches crashing
onto houses, fences and cars."

Ms Bleechmore said 50 crews had been kept busy throughout the night and the SES would
continue to work tomorrow to clean up debris.

"There are still reports of trees blocking driveways and things like that but we won't
be getting to them at all today because we've so many calls," she said.

The SA Country Fire Service (CFS) said a passing train was lucky not to be derailed
when it crashed into a tree that had fallen on a train line at Coonalpyn, in the state's
upper south east.

Crews were also called to a number of fires caused by lightning, the CFS said.

AAP la/sl/jt/jlw

KEYWORD: WIND SA NIGHTLEAD

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