Major power outages at Broken Hill, in far west New South Wales have forced the closure of state schools with authorities warning it could be a fortnight before a stable flow of electricity is restored.
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00:00Residents across the Far West have now been without power since 5pm yesterday afternoon.
00:07Now we're told from TransGrid that the region's sole generator tripped overnight and they're
00:13now planning to send four large generators to help power the region as soon as possible.
00:18But at this stage we are not expecting any power to be returned to the Far West until
00:23later this afternoon.
00:24Now we spoke with a local business operator who told us that she's incredibly frustrated
00:29by this scenario, and even more so that she's lost all of her perishable stock.
00:34We'll hear from her now.
00:35The staff don't know when they're going to be able to come in and work.
00:38We've pretty much just put everything on hold for now.
00:40I know, look, the workers here on the ground, the Central Energy, a lot of those guys, you
00:44know, we see them every day, you know, they're working their hearts out to kind of get the
00:48power back on, but, you know, this should never have happened in the first place.
00:53Yeah, I don't really know what much more to say.
00:57It's so frustrating, it's ridiculous.
01:00And we've also seen this morning that locals have been lining up for petrol with many of
01:04the stations around the community being closed.
01:08In terms of the community and the kind of funding that they'll be able to get, we found
01:11out last night that the state and federal government have announced that the region
01:15will be able to access the Disaster Recovery Fund.
01:19Now that funding will provide councils with the money to restore damaged public assets
01:24and provide immediate support to any essential services, so we're talking about schools
01:29and hospitals and that sort of thing.
01:31But at this point we're still waiting to hear what the exact funding amount will be, and
01:35as you can imagine, locals are eager to find out what support will be accessible to them
01:39at an individual level.