Inverell residents would be right in thinking the upcoming storm season may be a big one, with the weekend weather giving a sneak preview of what is yet to come.
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State Emergency Services and Essential Energy crews were kept busy, responding to several unplanned power outages across Inverell and the New England North West as strong winds lashed the area from Friday.
Damaging winds, averaging 60 to 70 km/h with peak gusts in excess of 90 km/h, tore across the elevated areas of the Northern Tablelands. Many large trees with roots unable to anchor them in the rain-sodden soil were simply blown over.
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Joerg Gruenfeld, NSW SES Inverell Unit Deputy Commander, said they'd had five call-outs across the two days, mainly for fallen trees and branches.
"We got five callouts, with the winds either breaking significant sized branches and dropping them in inconvenient places or trees just snapping," he explained.
Their first was before 3pm on Friday, were a pine tree had tumbled on phone lines near Lake Inverell. It wasn't responsible for the power outage, however.
"It was around 3pm [the power went out] and it was pretty much the whole town, and parts of it didn't come back on until 7pm," he said.
That Friday afternoon, more than 8,000 customers were without power across the region, including 2,028 homes and businesses in Walcha, 4,792 customers in Inverell, 1,441 customers in Glen Innes, and 620 homes and businesses in Uralla.
Essential Energy crews worked as quickly as safety allowed to isolate sections of the electricity network to restore power to as many customers as possible, before completing repairs and restoring power to all remaining customers," said Essential Energy community relations manager Bronya Pressler.
"There were also a number of outages affecting smaller numbers of customers as storms swept across the region."
Mr Gruenfeld said he hoped people would make sure to check over their homes before anymore storms struck the region.
"Coming into the storm season, people should check over their homes and look for dying damaged trees, clear gutters," he said. "Being proactive makes a big difference to what we see during storm season."
NSW SES Inverell Unit's Facebook page has information on when to call them in, and how to protect your home.
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