Hundreds of thousands customers experience outages from ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred hit the east coast of Australia on the weekend, bringing with it over 346,000 outages for customers before dissipating.

Over 73,000 customers in Australia are still experiencing outages in South East Queensland, according to energy distributor Energex.

According to Nasa, Alfred was a Category 2 storm, posing serious hazards to areas in its path. Its slow pace exacerbated its damaging effects, allowing heavy rains, storm surge, and high winds to lash populated coastal areas for several days leading up to landfall.

Alfred brought heavy rain and wind to populated areas, including Brisbane, Gold Coast, and Byron Bay.

According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the cyclone weakened significantly Sunday, but not before bringing outages to 346,000 customers.

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According to a 10 March update from Energex, over the past 24 hours their crews have brought 137,000 additional homes and businesses back online.

Overall, they add, since the cyclone started to impact the coast, crews have now restored more than half of the affected customers.

According to Reuters reportage, on Saturday one man died in floodwater in northern New South Wales, while two Australian defence force vehicles en route to help residents in the city of Lismore were involved in a road collision that injured several officers, officials said.

Commenting in an interview with Karl Stefanovic and Sarah Abo, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “…the recovery in this is going to take a long time.

“You've seen the beaches here on the coast have disappeared and certainly today there's still a lot of risk out there. People should stay safe, follow the authorities’ advice because we will see flash flooding in the region.”

This post has been updated to reflect the current number of outages, down from 145,000 reported Monday. To stay up to date with the number of outages, please refer to Energex's tracker.