One of the many trees blown over during the day. Photos: Rivers SES.
Wild winds buffeted Canberra today, bringing down power lines and trees across the national capital, and leaving hundreds of households without power and roads blocked.
An Emergency Services Agency spokesperson said the State Emergency Service had received dozens of requested for help, with almost every suburb impacted.
By 7.30pm the SES had received over 130 requests for assistance and SES and Fire and Rescue crews were continuing to respond. Many calls were for fallen trees. Crews were expected to be working into the night.
“There’s not been any reports of any serious injuries but we have had several incidents that have involved trees falling on to cars and on to roadways and driveways,” the spokesperson said.
The entire Territory had been affected and there was no one area that had suffered worse than another.
Evoenergy reported outages in Belconnen, Mitchell, Ainslie, the City, Lyneham, O’Connor, Downer, Kaleen, Gungahlin, Bruce, Florey, Hawker, Latham, Page, Scullin, Weetangera, Deakin, and Curtin this afternoon.
Power had been restored to hundreds of customers but there were still hundreds more affected, including more than 400 in the northern suburbs.
There was damage to property.
By 9pm, about 300 households were without power, including some new outages in the southern suburbs of Griffith, Forrest, Kingston and Kambah.
Power would not be restored in some areas until late tonight or early morning.
The outages forced CIT Bruce to cancel its afternoon and evening classes.
The Bureau of Meteorology said the Canberra region had been hit by westerly winds averaging 50km/h, gusting up to 90km/h.
It cancelled a Severe Weather Warning this evening as the winds abated.
