Thousands of residents across regional South Australia have woken up to their third day without power after wild weather hit the state on Saturday.
Gusty winds, heavy rain and 423,000 lightning strikes caused widespread damage to power lines across the state, leaving more than 34,000 people still waiting for electricity reconnections this morning.
Paul Roberts from SA Power Networks says recovery from this outage event is expected to take longer than it did after a statewide blackout in 2016.
"In the statewide blackout we were able to coordinate and put the plug back in whereas here we're actually having to rebuild many, many parts of the network across South Australia," he said.
Three-day outage
On the Eyre Peninsula, Cockaleechie resident Cherylynne Letton has been without power since Saturday, and said it might still be days before crews could access a fallen power line to repair the network.
"We had the crew come out late yesterday afternoon and they've actually found a line down in our neighbour's paddock where the lightning's hit the top of the transformer and that's exploded," she said.
"So, there's nothing to hold the line on so that's sitting in the ground.
"The paddock that they've got to get access to is quite wet so if they get a truck out there they'll get quite bogged.
"I think they’re trying to work out a bit of a plan A and B and C at the moment."
'Mother nature at its worst'
Ms Letton was able to restore the electricity in her house by using a back-up generator.
"So that's getting us through so we're able to use the basics like water and have a shower," she said.
"We didn't set it up for most of that Saturday because we thought it should be back on; generally, they've been pretty good with it all, but then by that Saturday evening we thought. 'Yeah, we might need to set something up."
Family members and neighbours without generators have been coming over to access power.
"The kids' freezers have all defrosted now and their fridges and I've had to throw out food... so they’ve been bringing some stuff here so we can cook up here," Ms Letton said.
"It’s a bit of a shame but you can't do much about it; it's just Mother Nature at its worst, really."
A millimetre a minute
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Port Lincoln received the heaviest rainfall in the state with more than 55mm recorded on Saturday.
Over in the state's mid north in Emu Downs north of Robertstown, resident Aaron Nienz said about 40 millimetres of rain fell in just 40 minutes.
"We were lucky we didn't have the wind or hail; it was just the heavy rain and flash flooding," Mr Nienz said.
"All the creeks come down and water comes down, so quickly it’s got nowhere to go ... all the dams are full at the minute and everything’s just saturated."
"We've had over 360mm of rain in spring so that's very wet for this area and we're pushing well over 500mm now and our yearly average is only about 400mm here."
SA Police also warned some communities in the mid-north were still unable to make triple-0 emergency calls due to Telstra outages following the storms.
The towns of Booborowie, Burra, Mount Bryan, Robertstown and Bright are still impacted, and police have urged the public to attend the nearest hospital or police station in the event of an emergency.
'A major job'
Mr Roberts said while it was hoped the majority of affected customers would be back on the network by the end of Tuesday, some jobs could take crews longer to attend to.
If a paddock cannot be accessed by a vehicle, crews will have to go out on foot.
"It will depend on what the damage is ... sometimes we talk to the farmer or the landholder about cutting another entry way into the pole, other times we have to wait," Mr Roberts said.
"Typically, in the city if we have a pole that gets knocked over by a vehicle or something it'll take us about 8 to 12 hours."
"It's a major job and the irony is we might have to do that work for one customer or for a thousand customers in the same situation."
