Cyclone Seroja: Western Power restores electricity to thousands of Geraldton homes as looters strike

Power is slowly returning to Geraldton after a three-day blackout caused by tropical cyclone Seroja, with thousands of households able to turn on the lights once again this afternoon. The blackout has left a chaotic aftermath in Geraldton, with only a handful of businesses able to open their doors, resulting in long queues of people lining up at those supermarkets, service stations, fast food outlets and cafes which have been able to use generator power. A Western Power spokesman said power had been restored to 6800 customers in Geraldton by 4pm, with a further 10,500 expected to be reconnected in the next few hours. Across the Mid West, 22,500 customers are still without power. Asset operations manager Zane Christmas said Western Power prepared for outages as much as possible, but Mid West power networks were simply not built to withstand cyclonic winds. “Nothing will really stand up to 170km/h wind gusts and our network is no different…it’s not something that we could plan for or mitigate against,” he said. According to Western Power, known damage to the network includes 130 transmission poles, four substations and 80 feeders. The economic impact of the widespread three-day business closure is still being counted. But what is known is that a mountainous amount of spoilt food will need to be thrown out, with the City of Greater Geraldton organising skip bins to be delivered across the city in coming days so people can dump their waste. City Mayor Shane Van Styn said Geraldton residents had shown a “high level” of patience this week. “The people of Geraldton only need to look further north to the Shire of Northampton to see how bad it could have been. That could have very easily been Geraldton,” he said. “I appreciate living without power is difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as losing your home and your neighbours losing their homes.” Mr Van Styn said the lessons learnt from this disaster would be the need for people to be better-prepared individually and as a community. He said the cyclone had exposed the need for the region to have a better power network. “This has shown our over-reliance on the South West Interconnected Grid and further boosts the case for stand-alone power generating capacity, for instance at Oakajee ... with the SWIS acting more as a back-up,” he said. Mr Van Styn said it was disappointing to hear reports of “petty” looting and break-ins involving youths taking advantage of Geraldton being disconnected to go on “small crime sprees”. Mid West Gascoyne Police Superintendent Roger Beer did not believe any crime issues related to cyclone-impacted communities were widespread. “We want to make sure that order is maintained, so you will see police around the place to keep the peace,” he said. He said there had been “significantly more” burglaries from Sunday night to 8am today — 28 compared to 17 in the same period last week. Communication issues were affecting the reporting of crimes, he said. Supt Beer said seven people have been arrested in relation to burglaries since Monday.