More than a week after the wild wind storms that knocked Broken Hill off the grid, residents have once again woken up with no power. The running blackouts are also affecting other towns throughout the far-west, leaving many locals increasingly frustrated.
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00:00Residents in Broken Hill started their morning with another unplanned outage.
00:06This single mother of two had to toss out an entire freezer's worth of food at a time when she's moving house.
00:13We've literally been living off of noodles and pasta for the past couple of days and using that little gas cooker.
00:20One of her daughters has cerebral palsy, among other conditions which require her to consume specific food.
00:27It's really frustrating because it's not just affecting me, it's affecting my children.
00:31Random blackouts, what are we meant to do in that time, who's going to help us?
00:35The blackouts extend far beyond Broken Hill, with Menindee, Wolcania and Tiburbara on the Queensland border among those suffering power outages.
00:45In Menindee, community members like Rob Gregory are hard at work.
00:50The head of tourism is also an electrician. He's been connecting generators constantly around town to keep the lights on.
00:58You help out where you can and I've been connecting up all the RFS generators into the community hall, into the service station.
01:06We've had no lines to ring triple O until the RFS come into town.
01:12While the power is back on here in Menindee and operating more reliably than in Broken Hill,
01:17directives to stay away from the region to conserve power have had an impact on tourism.
01:22It's yet another blow on top of what has already been a slow season.
01:27This is the last four weeks of our tourist season and usually it starts to peak up now and that hasn't happened.
01:33With plenty of water in the once lifeless Lake Menindee, there's optimism in the air tourists will flood back once the power is reliable.