VIDEO: Calls for a review of electricity security after thousands of households left without power in Victoria

RHIANA WHITSON, REPORTER:  This is the aftermath of last week's deadly storms that tore through Victoria.

The foothills of the Dandenongs, on the outskirts of Melbourne, were one of the areas hit. It is where Carolyn Askew lives with her sons.

CAROLYN ASKEW, STORM VICTIM:  The car was like just shaking. I had trees falling all around me and I didn't know whether they were alive or not.

So processing that is a lot but when I picked them up from school and I held them tight, and was crying, that is a big blessing.

RHIANA WHITSON:  More than half a million households and businesses lost power and about 1000 are still disconnected from electricity.

How long is your power going to be out for?

CAROLYN ASKEW:   Potentially another week.

RHIANA WHITSON:  How does that make you feel?

CAROLYN ASKEW:   It's getting a bit long now. You know, we can handle a few days, we can, even a week but the thought of having another week off is, it disrupts everything.

LINDEN MITCHELL, TRADER:  And you can see like, we can't do anything in here. It's just too dark to do anything.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Linden Mitchell runs a pizza parlour and the only pub in the town of Cockatoo. She estimates she’s lost about $10,000 in earnings in the past week.

What do you make of the response to a weather event like this?

LINDEN MITCHELL:  I just think that they are taking each event as it comes along. They’re not, there's been four major events every year for the last four years. It just seems to me that there could be a lot of things done.

RHIANA WHITSON:  The storm last week caused bushfires in the state's northwest and wild winds brought down six high voltage transmission towers.

STEPHEN NEVE, AUSNET EXECUTIVE GENERAL MANAGER:  It was the biggest weather event that we've seen in terms of customer impacts. There were 360,000 AusNet customers impacted. So to put that in perspective, that's about 40 per cent of our total customer base.

RHIANA WHITSON:  The biggest issue was fallen trees downing local power lines. 

STEPHEN NEVE:  What we saw last Tuesday is the challenges that we have associated with climate change. We are seeing events that are, you know, they seem to be more destructive and more frequent than what we've seen in the past.

RHIANA WHITSON:  AusNet Services is one of five electricity distribution businesses in Victoria. It owns the state’s transmission towers, and 40,000 kilometres of poles and wires.

STEPHEN NEVE:  The reality is we electrified the states, you know, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. We built a lot of transmission infrastructure, at that point that was relevant to the standards of the day.

And we're learning all the time, we're learning from these types of events, these types of wind events, about what those towers can withstand.

RHIANA WHITSON:  The local council is running five relief centres in the area for residents dealing with the fallout of the power outages.

Families like Caroline Askew’s have been frequent visitors here with the local primary school and childcare centre closed for days.

CAROLYN ASKEW:   At home generators are running, you know, all the time, chainsaws, all that sort of stuff. It's quite full on.

Just coming here for a bit of a break, community, community interaction, make sure people are okay and the kids to have a break away from the chaos that is at home.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Financial relief is being offered to residents who are still cut off from power. The Victorian state government has announced an independent review of the response to the outage.

LILY D'AMBROSIO, VICTORIAN ENERGY MINSTER:  Were there were sufficient crews deployed in good time, was the return to restoration of power done in as timely a way as possible, getting people back on supply as quickly as possible.

These are the things that is important for us to get to the bottom of.

STEPHEN NEVE:  We want to apologize like, this is a severe weather event and I guess for our customers just to be assured that we're working around the clock to try and get the remaining customers on as soon as we can.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Energy expert Tony Wood says a state review is not enough. He wants a national inquiry to investigate the standards and security of the entire country’s electricity network.

TONY WOOD, GRATTAN INSTITUTE:  It is like a version of Einstein's definition of insanity - if you keep doing the same stuff, you're going to get the same result.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Burying electricity transmission and power lines underground has been talked up by some as the solution but it would come at a massive cost – an estimated $160 billion in Victoria and take 40 years to complete.

TONY WOOD:  That's the system wide thing and that requires a pretty substantial review and a very strong commitment to change.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Tony Wood says more renewables and storage closer to communities is another way to stop wide-scale blackouts.

TONY WOOD:  If we've got a renewable system with distributed generation rather than big, centralized power stations, that means if a transmission line is damaged in this in a storm, and they will be, the extent of that damage will be much less.

RHIANA WHITSON:  Future-proofing the electricity network will be extremely costly to the power companies and will need approval from the federal regulator because those price rises will eventually be passed on to consumers.

Do customers need to accept that they're going to have to pay more if they want a more resilient network?

STEPHEN NEVE:  I think there is a balance there. Definitely some of the resilience activities that we would prioritize are the more cost-effective options.

RHIANA WHITSON:  A week on from the wild weather, and the economic impact of the power outages is dragging on. While half the businesses in this street have been reconnected to electricity, the other half are still in the dark.

These local business owners who aren’t lucky enough to be on the right side of the street are desperate to get back to work.

Some say they would be happy to pay more to keep the lights on.

ELISE TURNEDGE, TRADER:  We’ve had no income for the last seven days. So, I’d gladly pay a little bit extra if I had to, to get the infrastructure upgraded.

RHIANA WHITSON:  But not everyone in this community is convinced that ordinary people should be left to foot the bill.

CAROLYN ASKEW:   Our cost of living is so high anyway, to do that, many people would go without, and I don't think that's acceptable at all.

LINDEN MITCHELL:  This is going to happen again; it could happen again next week. Just for heaven's sake, do something to help the residents be able to withstand the things that are going to happen in the future.