Thousands of households across Casey were left without power overnight on Tuesday 27 January, after extreme heat triggered widespread faults across the Ausnet electricity network.
The outages followed a day of extreme heat across Melbourne, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees and remaining oppressive well into the night.
An AusNet spokesperson said at 8.45am on Wednesday 28 January that there are approximately 15,000 customers off supply across AusNet’s distribution network. “Extreme heat caused a high number of faults overnight, which led to a peak of 55,000 customers losing supply at approximately 10pm,” they said.
“AusNet crews have been working throughout the night to bring customers back online. “The extreme weather damaged substations and fuses across various components of our network.
“The most impacted areas are the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne and the Central and North East of the State.”
AusNet has not provided an estimated restoration time for all affected areas.
In Casey, multiple unplanned power outages were recorded from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, affecting suburbs including Narre Warren South, Berwick, Hampton Park, Cranbourne North, Clyde North and Narre Warren.
Power was lost at various times from as early as 6.49pm on Tuesday as extreme heat triggered repeated faults across the network.
Narre Warren South was hit the hardest.
In the suburb, three separate outages were logged between 9.44pm on Tuesday and 9.06am on Wednesday, with two overnight incidents restored by early morning and a later outage affecting about 200 customers still under investigation.
Berwick also experienced several outages, including one from about 9.24pm on Tuesday that was restored by 2.55am on Wednesday, while other faults were reported into Wednesday morning.
Many outages across the municipality were restored overnight, but some areas remained without power or under assessment as of mid-morning Wednesday, with between 90 and 200 customers affected per incident.
