Gusty storms in Western Queensland have brought down trees and destroyed critical energy infrastructure over the past few days.
Power has been restored to more than 1,500 residents, after a widespread outage which Ergon Energy blamed on wild weather snapping a concrete power pole near Wyandra on Monday.
"The crews out there that I've spoken to last night and today, they've never seen it in the time the line has been there," principal communications advisor Brett Judge said.
"It's been there for a while and they've not heard of it before."
Mr Judge said replacing the 21.5-metre concrete power pole was no small feat.
"It took a fair bit of planning logistically to not only source a replacement pole, but also to figure out how best to time things so that they weren't wasting time," he said.
"Working closely with the Paroo Shire Council to get some heavy plant equipment, they were able to cut a new track to get access to where the pole had come down.
"They were thinking that it may have been as late as 6 o'clock this evening, but for that outage they've managed to get them all back on by about quarter-past-two."
Welcome reprieve
The Bureau of Meteorology said the trough moved into the south-west on Saturday but was most active on Sunday and brought wind gusts of up to 80 kilometres per hour.
Forecaster Felim Hanniffy said it was likely there were more powerful gusts that were not recorded because to the sparsity of observations in the region.
"Certainly given the gusty nature of the system as it moved through, there was certainly the potential to cause damage," he said.
"Not a whole lot of rainfall recorded over the south-west, though — most of the rainfall was reserved for further east, across more central and south-eastern areas, over the past 24 hours."
The BOM is forecasting a reprieve in the coming days.
"Looks like that trough feature has very much shifted further east," Mr Hanniffy said.
"Temperatures are going to remain on the cooler side, in some instances five to 10 degrees below average across much of the south and south-west.
"But when you look further ahead, it looks like that trough feature starts to push back westward again early next week, so we could see increased shower and thunderstorm activity returning to parts of the west and south-west."
