If you’re in South Australia, chances are you’re not reading this. Widespread blackouts across the state caused by severe storms mean that all of South Australia — anywhere not with a backup generator or an uninterruptible power supply — has gone dark.
Update #3: An update on SA Power’s official Facebook page warns that around 90,000 customers are still without power supply, and while they may not have their supply restored until tomorrow the majority of the state is back online.
Update #2: SA Power says that a lot of residents are still unlikely to have power by tomorrow, although those within metropolitan Adelaide should be OK.
People in the red shaded area are supplied by damaged transmission lines – unlikely to have power tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/r5Z35IYtgt
— SA Power Networks (@SAPowerNetworks) September 28, 2016
Update #1: SA Power is advising that power to parts of the metropolitan area is being slowly brought back online:
We are in the process of restoring power to parts of the metro area as transmission supplies become avail. More updates to follow.
— SA Power Networks (@SAPowerNetworks) September 28, 2016
Users are advised not to report outages, with further updates to be provided through SA Power official channels, including social media.
The statewide power outage means that any mobile cell towers that are still operational will be running on battery backups or diesel generators. Many towers are already down across the state due to a lack of backup power or outages further up the backhaul network.
SA Power is telling citizens to get ready for extended outages, and to make sure they conserve mobile phone power wherever possible for emergencies.
Please brace for extended outages and ensure you conserve mobile device battery.
— SA Power Networks (@SAPowerNetworks) September 28, 2016
South Australia is currently experiencing a blackout
Developing…
Comments
95 responses to “South Australians Are Without Power Right Now [UPDATE]”
I didn’t realise South Australia even had power over there
Stay classy, dude.
Thats ok, I live in Perth, nothing to do here after 9pm
Oh they do. They also have a transport system that moves without the aid of stop motion, 😛
We don’t. The storm has stopped our lamp oil being delivered by horse and cart.
“You hear? The power’s fucked in SA!”
“Mate, Port Adelaide’s been crap for years.”
Biggest power outage since the 2007 AFL grand final!
Hahaha gold!
Lack of Power in September is a regular occurence.
Seems like the only people who would care about this can’t read it.. CUZ THEY UNEDUCATED AF HAHA ZING.
I’ll show myself out
I LOLed!
This’ll be the catalyst we need to revive PS Vita … I can feel it.
That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, actually, since I’m still waiting for the power to come back on.
Steamworld Heist – good game!
South Australia returns to the dark ages…also known as “yesterday”.
Oh man. South ozs surely have it bad enough already.
@doktora_molotov I honestly wasn’t replying to you, started a new thread.
Power is coming back on now. I can start learning me a book.
So we’re having the storm of the century, have lost all power and you kind souls think it’s an excuse to hang crap on SA. Where’s your compassion gamer brethren?
Peoples lives are at risk tonight and you’re having a laugh. I thought Kotaku was a kind community?
Nah, any time’s good to make fun of them, even without a storm.
Nah, it’s pretty shit. I guarantee if anyone started on the floods in NSW, you guys would be getting pretty precious about it.
*shrug* Not me.
Sorry dude, it’s not you. We’re all a bit pissed here at the moment. I mean we had to talk to each other, make conversation, socialise… it was horrible!!
Now there’s a proper sympathy-grabber 😛
Wonder how the old SA crew is actually, haven’t spoken to any of them in a good few years…
We here in Queensland intend to when we catch up with the rest of Australia in 25 years or so…
We were worried we’d have to start playing a family board game.
When Queensland flooded a few years back and had a state of emergency it was pretty horrendous too. Our shit lasted weeks up here. Its not a competition though as a disaster is a disaster. Sometimes it’s just peoples way of coping by using a little levity.
And c’mon man look on the bright side, at least SA gets to miss the Bachelorette?
Usually the levity should come from the people affected though, cheap shots directed at those affected is not really well received.
Levity can come from anyone, as long as it’s not really meant in a horrible manner. There’s no law stating it has to come from only those affected.
Agreed there is no law stating that people shouldn’t act like superior arseholes. To be clear you seem to also take the piss out of yourself so this is not aimed at you… others though.
A fair point indeed
Finally im back from the dark ages.
I live in Adelaide and I thought these comments were pretty funny
Just curious Dirty, which suburb?
HAH. No you have power. Like me in Qld, living in the dark ages is another issue altogether 😉
A fucking joke. Not like the state got hit by a hurricane. If the infrastructure cant handle one bloody storm someone is not doing their damn job properly.
Get your shit together SA power. Its not like you dont wring enough money out of us to pay for decent preventative maintainence.
I think the hurricane force winds are actually forecast for tomorrow… 🙁
Because Adelaide so rarely gets hit by extreme weather events the infrastructure just wasn’t designed to handle it. I grew up in Darwin and I’m always amazed how much the roads flood and how common blackouts are during mild storms like these.
I think further local blackouts are very likely if the strong winds come tomorrow.
Every. Fucking. Time. Every time there’s a storm, we lose power for, like, 9 hours! You’re right, it’s a fucking joke!
If it had formed in the tropics it would be considered as a cyclone. Sure only a cat1 but SA isn’t designed to protect you from cyclonic style weather.
Yeah…except for the part where 22 major towers have gone down due to the storm…that’s 22 they’ve found so far at least.
It’s surprising they got it back up so fast.
And the power station hit by lightning. Mere flesh wound!
I take it you didn’t see the high voltage transmission towers being bent flat to the ground. 140 km/hr gust are enough to damage the infrastructure enough that safeties kick in.
Dude, we weren’t seeing anything! The power dropped out again for a few hours in a bunch of places earlier this morning. We only found out the Lard Lad was kicking towers over, and generally shitting all over Pt. Augusta around lunchtime.
its not SA power, its Electanet (or something like that) also due to some major failings by one of the treasurers for not allocating funds properly.
Shhhhh be nice
Somewhere, Michael Atkinsons sitting in a house somewhere rubbing his hands together saying “Finally my plans are coming together…”
…it ain’t his hands he’s rubbing. :S
Possibly the only funny comment he so far. The rest are not funny; especially to me as I have a fair bit of family there in their olden years.
Hope theyre all ok mate :/
Cheers, champ. I at least know my aunt/God Mother is OK.
My suburb was okay, but down in the Scummy South, despite the weather, no one can tell if the storm even passed though. :p
In all seriousness, the complete drop out of everything, state wide, was pretty crazy, but the loss of entire phone network was a seriously nasty shock. I was in the RAH when it happened, and they were nearly in panic there as their back up systems didn’t even come close to their minimum emergency power thresholds.
In past blackouts, phone towers have rarely been affected, but this time was crazy. In the CBD and inner metro, we had absolutely nothing! I think my mobile signal came back after about 5 hours, and it was sporadic and unreliable. Apparently they’re still (as of 12:20am) currently fishing people out of the lifts they’ve been trapped in since around half 4. Some BIG fucking questions need to be asked about the telecomms dropping out. A lot of people are extremely pissed about having no, or very sketchy, unreliable phone coverage.
Were landlines working, or were they dead as well?
They were out for a while when I was at the RAH, but I can’t say elsewhere. I haven’t spoken to anyone who’s been using them so far. Trying to track someone down who’s on foot was impossible for a while there.
Would not surprise me if even they were out; they don’t require much but even phone lines need power so if there is a state wide black out it’s a safe bet the phones are out as well.
As we have family still in SA, my mother was keeping an eye on the SA power Web site. Then I hear her reading this out.
I though she was messing around but it turns out that’s what they freaking said!
The comms went out with the power so how the hell is someone able to get Internet at all?!
Yep…I read that message after power had come back on…
I had cellular data intermittently, so I was checking it there.
What’s really bad is that apparently even the 000 number went down for a while, so if somebody had need an ambulance or whatever they wouldn’t have been able to call one.
Mobile towers have battery backup. You get internet for a few hours but i think it powers down after that so people can still contact emergency services.
North of Adelaide, mobile coverage was mostly down from 5pm onwards for most people. The Telstra users I know said they started dropping out just after dark.
Oh, and to you shitkickers giving SA hell, a hearty fuck you to you all*! :p
(*Except for you Nowra. You’re all right in my book!)
Geez, A little salty there mate. Then again, You do live in SA.
I hammered that out before I had my snickers. :p And if you’ve ever been here, we swear at a tier 1 standard. We could make Western Sydney-siders webbed toes curl. What differentiates us from Westies though, is that we get out of the bath to piss. :p
For sure. Once upon a time I didn’t swear at all. Then I went out with a girl from Adelaide, and it was all downhill from there 😛
But she recovered and went on to greater things. You are a different story though, 😀
You left yourself open for that one, champ, 😛
It’s all 100% true though 😛
Edit: Wow really, in moderation purgatory just from this?
It doesn’t help that she’s moderating this. ;p
I’ll take the backwater degradation, but I’ve honestly never been embarrassed about being South Australian till yesterday. Absolutely appalling that our whole fracking state let alone the mobile networks were down for so long. Only got coverage and power back at about 10:30 last night. Complete BS with how much we pay for electricity.
Well 22 of the major towers went down…that they’ve discovered so far.
It’s surprising that they got it up and running so fast.
i had mobile coverage the whole time, im on Optus.
it was the interconnector from upstate/interstate that went down run by electranet. so it was mainly there fault, it was the transmission lines effected, but not much you can do when 22 towers get knocked the fuck out.
im not making excuses though, there should have definitely been some redundancies in place and someone definitely needs to answer for the appalling conditions.
I’m on Optus and lost coverage after a couple of hours, though only for a couple of hours until the power started coming back to other areas. My son’s on Telstra and had no problems. We got power back at 10:30.
looks like it passed over Melbourne last night and we got away relatively unscathed.
No, it’s still headed our way.
The front passed over but I accept the low is still hanging over SA.
To be honest, I have no idea what is happening any more. =/
Given the wholesale price of electricity in SA a few months back people were probably relieved to not have to pay for a few hours!
Luckily the brief spike in price never got passed on to retail.
Is that so?!! Well see that’s something that no-one (I’m in Qld so we don’t get the full story) mentioned at the time – that a lot better than it was made out to be in the national press
“SA Great”, amirite?
They’re lucky they got the power back before proper nightfall. Would’ve been a fantastic opportunity for people to rob banks and go heaps feral (more so than the SA standard).
No power and no comms at night would’ve been absolute anarchy.
i love how people call us feral, its literally a handful of suburbs which dont even make up the poplulation of places like coolenghetto, or frankston, or western sydney. or NT.
Well, admittedly our ghetto is more “feral” than the ghettos interstate. It’s like the wild wild west meets ghetto white trash
you reckon? i dunno, some of those suburbs interstate are worse then ours. ours dont make national headlines, the others do though.
yeah, because they aren’t organized like other states. that’s why they are more feral – they are without rule. anarchy, lol.
My wife had to fly home from a work trip to Melbourne into all this shit last night. Flight got delayed by about an hour but eventually went. Before they boarded, the pilot actually came out to the gate to speak to the passengers in order to “reassure” them that they wouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks and that they had enough fuel “for several landing attempts and then to return to Melbourne if necessary”. That was not reassuring at all! She was talking to another lady waiting at the gate and neither of them had ever seen a pilot do that before, so everybody was even more freaked out than they already were!
Oh well, managed to make it home safe and sound, anyway, and our power came back on about 10 minutes before her taxi turned up, so she didn’t even have to endure the blackout 😛
70,000 lightning strikes during the storm. Seventy terrawatts gone to waste. Could have used it to boil water in steam turbines.
Maybe that’s the renewable energy source that we’re missing – imagine if we had lightning rods all over the place that could somehow harness that energy and distribute it
Do you want Frankensteins? Because thats how you get Frankensteins.
SA found the light switch it seems.
Please either change the headline to this article or stop it from staying near the top of the page.
Fixed it up, threw in the latest update from SA Power as well.
Thank God for Pokemon Go making Woolworths sell good power banks for low prices, as well as having some torches.
We had devices to play and shadow puppets as well.
Basically today all the experts are saying the right wing Fed pollies such as Frydenburg & Xenphon are totally wrong in trying to blame renewables.
Xenophon isn’t particularly right wing, but yeah, people like him and Frydenburg and Joyce and Hanson are carrying on like imbeciles on this issue in order to try and score some cheap points. In fact, when people like Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson weigh in on an issue (no surprise that they both represent a state with a massive coal industry), you can generally count on the truth being on the opposite side of the argument.
It doesn’t matter how you’re generating your power, whether it’s wind, coal, gas, nuclear, whatever. If a whole punch of major power lines get knocked out of the grid that connects that generation to the end user, then you’re going to lose power. You could have a big, fat coal fired plant out there instead of a wind farm, and those 22 towers would still have got knocked down by the storm and the state still would have endured a major blackout.
TL;DR it was a transmission problem, not a generation problem.
Are you sure that we can’t blame roads washing away on the failure of the car manufacturing industry in SA?
to be fare, Xenophon takes a lot of things to heart for the people of SA and on their behalf tries to get answers. he really is passionate about SA. his head might be in the wrong place with some of the facts he believes, but i reckon his heart is in the right place.
Oh I don’t doubt it, but he also likes to see himself on TV more than any other politician I’ve seen. Which may be partly because he’s an independent so doesn’t have as much money to spend on advertising as the major parties, so he uses the news outlets well to get himself free publicity and keep himself in the public eye. But I suspect he just thought “Oh shit, it’s already Wednesday already and I haven’t been on TV yet this week, so let’s take advantage of this situation” and puts out some ill-informed commentary which the media dutifully picks up and runs with.
not sure whether the being on tv thing regularly is a bad thing on not. sure you cant just go sprouting shit that you havnt researched, but he is one of the few independents that made it in with the big wigs. but yes, definitely need researched facts if you are on national tv, i agree.