120,000 Properties Still Without Power in Storm-Ravaged Australia

Vientiane: Australian utilities raced Tuesday to reconnect more than 120,000 homes and businesses still blacked out by gales and floods that bashed the east coast. Cyclone Alfred, which hovered just offshore before making landfall as a tropical low on Saturday, battered a 400-kilometre (250-mile) stretch of coast for five days. According to Lao News Agency, the wild weather claimed one life when a 61-year-old man driving a four-wheel-drive pickup was swept off a bridge into a flooded river on Friday. The wind and rain have since eased across the coastline straddling Queensland and New South Wales, but swathes of the country remained without power. In hardest-hit southeast Queensland, where 118,000 properties were still cut off on Tuesday morning, regional provider Energex said it aimed to get 95 percent of them reconnected by Friday. "More than 2,000 staff are on the ground again today and the weather is looking good for work and flying our choppers to assess isolated sections of the network," it said in an update. Energex noted that more than 450,000 premises in Queensland lost power during the emergency, marking a state record for outages caused by a natural disaster. In northeastern New South Wales, Essential Energy reported that 7,600 homes and businesses were still without power. "It is expected that customers may experience the power going on and off for periods of time as crews work through the faults and damage caused by the high winds, heavy rain, fallen trees, and vegetation debris," the company stated.