Thousands in Australia left without power after worst storm in decade

Thousands of people in southeast Queensland have been left without power after the region's biggest storm in a decade.

Ergon Energy confirmed on Wednesday that as many as 15,000 homes in the Bundaberg region, 360 km north of Brisbane, were still without power after the worst non-cyclonic storm in the area in 10 years.

Almost 30,000 homes were hit by blackouts as the storm hit on Tuesday evening, damaging more than 200 power lines.

"As a standalone storm, it would probably be the worst in the Wide Bay region in about 10 years," Rod Rohbein from Ergon told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Wednesday.

"We'll have a lot of additional crews coming in today ... close to 200 crews working in the field this afternoon.

"We have choppers that are on standby to go up and have a look at the rural areas today, so at this stage it would be premature to try and put a timeline on it when we don't really know the full extent of the damage."

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said that winds in excess of 100 km per hour (kmph) were recorded during the storm.

"So that's probably why we're seeing quite a bit of reports of trees down and damage to structures," forecaster Michael Knepp said.

"Really powerful winds resulted in a lot of vegetation coming down on our lines."

"We've had close to 200 reports of lines that have fallen, are low lying or have vegetation on them."

Knepp said that the BOM had received reports of hailstones as big as four centimeters in diameter near the town of Kandanga, 220 kilometers south of Bundaberg.

State Emergency Services had a backlog of 100 jobs to attend to on Wednesday, authorities said.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)