BADGER CREEK, NORTH EAST OF MELBOURNE, Australia (Reuters) — Wind gusts and storms lashed the Australian state of Victoria on Sunday (October 9), killing one woman and disrupting power supplies to more than 100,000 people.
Roughly 120,000 homes were without power across the country’s second-most populous state and Melbourne’s International Airport closed one of two runways, causing significant delays.
Falling trees injured several people, with tree branches crashing into houses causing widespread damage.
“I heard a great big crash, I was asleep and I heard my mum screaming,” said one lady after a tree smashed into her home.
“I was freaking out, it’s my kids, it’s my babies,” added another.
A woman in her 50s died when a tree fell on her home in the town of Milgrove, east of Melbourne, with neighbor Paul Osborne unable to help the lady.
“I was (inaudible) and all of a sudden I heard a crack and then I watched the tree just come down here and as it’s got to about there I bolted around to see if my neighbor was alright.”
Victorian Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley said rescue services did everything they could to save the lady’s life.
“It took a little while to actually get to the lady herself to confirm that she was dead so there was work being done on the scene. Every frantic effort was made to get to her,” Lapsley said on Sunday.
The electricity outages come a week after severe storms and lighting strikes left all of South Australia state without power for nearly 24 hours, grinding industries to a halt.
An independent review into the South Australian blackout was launched on Friday (October 7), after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, of the conservative Liberal Party, blamed the state’s high dependence on renewables for the outage.
Turnbull’s assessment drew criticism from state leaders, who accused the prime minister of letting ideology drive his comments.
