Extreme storm knocks out power to entirety of South Australia
A swirling, intense low pressure system spawned severe thunderstorms that took out the state of South Australia's entire power grid on Wednesday local time.
As of Thursday, the city of Adelaide and most of the state still lacked power, as more showers and thunderstorms, many of them bearing damaging winds, worked their way across the Adelaide area once again. Adelaide has a population of about 1.2 million.
Australian media are calling the storm among the worst in at least a half-century, if not longer.
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The low pressure system responsible for the blackout resembles a comma on satellite imagery, a textbook shape for intense non-tropical storm systems.
It was centered off the coast of South Australia and intensified rapidly on Wednesday, with wind speeds equivalent to a hurricane and high waves building off the coast.
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The storm's center is moving closer to the coast, bringing cold air aloft that will help promote thunderstorm formation. Strong winds remain in the forecast for the Adelaide area, and as of midnight on Sept. 29, local time, the city was seeing wind gusts of around 40 miles per hour.
Minlaton Airport, located on a peninsula just west of Adelaide, recorded a wind gust of 91 kilometers per hour, or 56 miles per hour, at midnight.
Power grid was protecting itself
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According to The Guardian, the blackout was caused when high winds in the northern parts of the state took out five or six electrical transmission towers, which caused the entire state's network to shut down at around 3:48 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
The South Australia premier, Jay Weatherill, said that the shutdown of the entire grid was a step taken to isolate the problem to South Australia and avoid cutting power to all of Australia.
"This is a major weather event and the system has reacted a it is supposed to react," Weatherill said, according to The Advertiser newspaper. "The system operates in this way to shut the system down and is now being restored in regard to those protocols."
Flights into and out of Adelaide were halted for a time due to the lack of power in the terminal buildings, traffic came to a standstill without traffic signals, and other power-dependent systems also experienced disruptions.
The storm is expected to swirl its way southeastward, bringing strong winds and showers to Tasmania through the weekend.
Residents of Adelaide and other parts of South Australia have been sharing their experience of the storm and the electricity blackout via social media.
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Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
