By Mikayla van Loon
While some residents and businesses were lucky to see power return to their homes and shops in the Dandenong Ranges, some were still playing the waiting game a week later.
For owner of Enviro Laundromat in Monbulk, Carl Callaghan, when the power went out early in the morning on Friday 29 October, he knew people would be in desperate need of a place to wash clothes.
Having had a generator from the previous storms in June, Mr Callaghan said he knew it wouldn’t be able to run the whole shop.
“It only runs six out of 26 machines. But the other impact is, in my mind at least, we are an essential service, that part is fact but the community needed it and we need to be there at those times,” he said.
“So when that occurs, we also then get overwhelmed with people needing to do a basic service and requirement of the house, which is having clean clothes.”
This time around Mr Callaghan decided to purchase more generators to ensure he could run 20 of the 26 machines and cater for more people.
“Obviously, that’s an enormous financial outlay to do that but we do feel that as an essential service, we just really need to be there for people.”
According to Ausnet Services, at least 461 customers were still without power as at 11am on Friday 5 November.
This was spread across the suburbs of Upwey, Sassafras, Monbulk, Kalorama, Kallista, Sherbrooke, Cockatoo, Emerald and Gembrook.
AusNet Services could not confirm if all of these outages were related to the storms directly.
Power returned to most residents over the weekend, with Emerald residents seeing the return around midday on Saturday 6 November.
Mr Callaghan was relieved when the power returned to his business at the beginning of the week and only had to go a few days without power but he knew many people were still going without.
“The flow on is now where obviously there’s still a lot of homes without power, there’s a number of homes that don’t have water that is a separate issue. A water pump got damaged in the storms so we’ll become very busy in that respect.”
Five or more people came to wash their clothes at the Envrio Laundromat because they had been told to reduce the amount of water they were needing to use due to a broken water pump.
Having gone through the storms just a few months ago, Mr Callaghan said they were far worse than what was experienced a week ago because not only were there power outages, people were unable to get off the mountain because of a lack of fuel and trees blocking roads.
After speaking with other businesses, Mr Callaghan said many had been gearing up for a great first weekend back to trading post-restrictions.
“Coming into the weekend, that first weekend, which was a long weekend, out of a lockdown, they were all geared up to try and start afresh or do some recoveries and then it all just fizzled away.”
