STATEMENTS BY MEMBERS

Ms TEMPLEMAN (Macquarie) (16:11): A fierce storm swept across Macquarie at the weekend, causing widespread fallen trees, branches and powerlines and requiring an immediate emergency response to clear roads and damaged homes. I know we were all grateful to the SES, RFS, police, fire and ambulance crews who turned out to assist, and to the Endeavour Energy and Telstra crews trying to do repairs.

The Hawkesbury saw the worst of the power outages, with tens of thousands of homes blacked out into Sunday, which was particularly distressing for people relying on power for sewerage and water and for those facing the loss of perishables in homes and restaurants that were stocked up for Father's Day. Endeavour Energy returned about 60,000 homes across the region at the weekend, calling in assistance from another energy company.

But, even today, they still have work to do to restore the remaining 1,400 customers as quickly and safely as possible. The most heavily impacted areas remain Mount Tomah, Bilpin and Colo, with significant damage along Bells Line of Road and in the Bilpin area. They're also finding new hazards as they assess the nearly 300 incidents with 180 outages where just one customer was affected.

I also thank Telstra for the work they're doing, but there is still work to be done to restore landlines, the NBN and mobile towers, including in Richmond. It's a really big job; please make their life easy while they're out there. This always reminds us that we need these contingency plans for these events.