Why are the phones not working?
There are no hard-wired phones left in this country, so when the net goes down it all goes down, including mobiles. What a rort. As far as I know, they usually pull these blackouts to do system upgrades. More from that story:
Power is being slowly restored to the outback city, after a freak storm caused catastrophic damage to the transmission infrastructure linking Kalgoorlie to the broader grid.
As of Saturday morning around 4,300 customers remained without power, with 664 in the Goldfields and 1,800 in the Perth Hills and 1,500 in the Wheatbelt.
"It's still a significant amount of customers without supply and we will continue working today and into the weekend to restore those," Western Power's Zane Christmas told ABC radio.
He said there were about 700 operation crews stretched across the network.
Telstra said 10 mobile base stations remained off-air on Saturday, down from 198 earlier in the week.
( ha! Telstra own$ the whole shop! )
The power in Kalgoorlie went out on Wednesday evening, but some parts of the Wheatbelt were cut off on Tuesday.
Doug Daws from Goldfields Masonic Homes was scrambling to find generators to power the Kalgoorlie retirement village when the ABC spoke to him during the blackout.
"It's not been good. We always try and put a brave face on it," he said.
"But some of the old people are struggling a bit."
A long-time community leader in the city, he said the repeated blackouts were frustrating for locals.
"We're tired of the porky pies from Western Power, Synergy and all the other people in this mix," he said.
"They assured us the emergency generator would be ready to fire up. That was a lie — it failed."