Wallan power outage explained: AusNet Services confirms cause of Whittlesea, Hume, Mitchell shire incident

It was an extra chilly winter night for thousands of unlucky Melburnians hit by a power outage lasting up to eight hours in some areas.

Thousands of Melbourne residents were unable to switch on a heater or cook a hot meal after an electricity outage struck the northern suburbs on Wednesday afternoon.

Small business owners, remote workers, and those concerned for the elderly took to social media to voice their frustrations about “rolling blackouts” as the outage hit towns in Whittlesea, Hume, and the Shire of Mitchell about 1pm.

The worst affected areas were Wallan and Beveridge, with more than 4000 residents told to expect to be without power until 9pm.

Local supermarkets were reportedly forced to temporarily close, traffic lights were out of action, and an indoor shopping centre was reportedly evacuated because of smoke coming from a takeaway food outlet that was unable to use its extraction fans.

Wallan pastry chef Tiffany Michelle of Little Red‘s Patisserie said her day had been a “nightmare” as the outage had “caused our oven to turn off twice during baking and all products in the oven were ruined and binned”.

A spokeswoman for energy company AusNet Services confirmed high winds affecting a conductor north of Wallan caused the unplanned outage.

The majority of customers’ electricity was restored within an hour of the incident but “a few” customers waited until 9pm.

“Some branches hit one of the lines which brought a conductor down so we took the line down for safety reasons,” the spokeswoman said.

“We put people back on in stages and just those last few customers, unfortunately it was 9pm, which is clearly not great given the weather conditions.

“We’d like to apologise for the inconvenience.”

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, temperature at Kilmore Gap- between Wallan and Kilmore — dropped as low as 4.7C on Wednesday evening.

AusNet said it regularly monitors its power lines and conducts vegetation management to prevent unplanned outages.