THOUSANDS of local residents remained without power for much of yesterday and Attunga continued to mop up after Thursday’s ferocious storm left a massive clean-up bill in its wake.
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The CBD of Manilla was “like a ghost town” yesterday, locals reported to The Leader, as the loss of electricity and phones – both mobiles and landlines – forced a large number of businesses to close their doors.
Those that opened did so with the help of generators, and more basic measures like eskies in the case of the Post Office Hotel to keep drinks cold – and an old set of manual scales made a rare appearance at Manilla Fruit and Veg.
Essential Energy teams worked through Thursday night and into last night trying to repair the extensive damage to the electricity network, which included the downing of six power poles and snapped power lines.
About 3600 premises in the Attunga, Barraba, Manilla and Upper Manilla areas were blacked out just after 2pm on Thursday when the powerful storm cell cut a swathe through the district, unroofing homes, smashing windows and bringing down trees.
Attunga residents Geoff and Margaret Webster spent yesterday waiting for insurance assessors at their badly damaged home.
“We lost about 40 glass louvre window panes. We lost a shed roof and the wind pushed the whole shed sideways onto the ground,” Mrs Webster said.
Both cars were hail-damaged, Mrs Webster describing the hail stones as “bigger than golf balls”.
Trees were another major casualty and the couple lost a wall of their machinery shed.
At Manilla, resident Fiona Sing said the extended power outage was causing headaches, “but what can you do?”
She was among hundreds of residents concerned for food in fridges and freezers as the black-out stretched on.
Ms Sing said her cousin told her the ever-popular Chrisco hampers had only arrived this week and she was concerned much of the food would be spoiled.
For her though, the major issue was the loss of laptops and mobiles, which made it hard to get information on the situation.
She rang The Leader yesterday on an old wall phone she said hadn’t been used in about four years after the family got a cordless wireless handset, rendered useless during the power outage.
Daughter Vienna’s presentation at Manilla Central School yesterday also had to be amended to accommodate the lack of power, with an emergency generator brought in.
“We’re just sitting here waiting,” Ms Sing said from her home at lunchtime yesterday, “that’s all we can do at the moment.”
