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(UPDATE) SYDNEY, Australia — Australian energy firms raced on Tuesday to reconnect more than 120,000 homes and businesses still blacked out by gales and floods that bashed the country’s east coast.Cyclone Alfred, which hovered just offshore before making landfall as a tropical low last Saturday, battered a 400-kilometer (250-mile) stretch of coast for five days.The wild weather claimed the life of a 61-year-old man who was driving a four-wheel-drive pickup and swept off a bridge into a flooded river last Friday.The wind and rain have since eased across the coastline straddling Queensland and New South Wales states, but swathes of the country remained without power.In hardest-hit Queensland’s southeast, where 118,000 properties were still cut off on Tuesday morning, regional provider Energex said it aimed to get 95 percent of them reconnected by Friday.”More than 2,000 staff are on the ground again today, and the weather is looking good for work and flying our choppers to assess isolated sections of the network,” Energex said in an update.The firm also said more than 450,000 properties in Queensland lost power during the emergency — a state record for outages caused by a natural disaster.In northeastern New South Wales, Essential Energy said 7,600 homes and businesses were still without power.”It is expected that customers may experience the power going on and off for periods of time as crews work through the faults and damage caused by the high winds, heavy rain, fallen trees and vegetation debris,” the company said.
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