In terms of media releases, the wording was about as blunt and descriptive as you're likely to see.
Cyclone Alfred, explained south-east Queensland poles-and-wires company Energex, had "hammered" large parts of the region, left "hundreds of powerlines on the deck" and created risks that were potentially deadly.
There would be no "quick fix" as crews faced the daunting task of first identifying the faults along almost every part of the network and then the painstaking job of fixing them.
"Once we understand what we're up against, we can start getting the lights back on," Energex advised.
"But as a rule of thumb, the more widespread and severe the damage, the more complex and time-consuming the repair."
With hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales without power, questions are inevitably turning to the strength of the electricity system.
How resilient is the grid in Australia?
And in a world where storms and other types of extreme weather are expected to become more common, is it resilient enough?
Neil Greet from Engineers Australia summed it up simply.
When asked whether Australia's electricity systems were very resilient, he said: "Not very."
"I did a review with Engineers Australia in 2014 on energy security and then I updated it last year," Mr Greet said.
"It says 'Energy Security: Where did we go in 10 years?' Basically, nowhere.
"And you will see, unfortunately, that we have created more vulnerabilities."
According to Mr Greet, Australia was preoccupied with a debate about the merits of fossil fuels compared with renewable energy.
But he pointed out that such discussions only related to sources of generation and did not take into account other parts of the system.
Worse still, he said Australia was no longer even doing an official stocktake of its overall position through a process known as the national energy security assessment.
"The last one was done in 2011," he said.
"Now, that's pretty piss poor. Security is much more than just electricity generation. So we've sort of faffed around.
"Hence we have no idea that when we're faced with extreme weather events what will be the effects because we don't understand what our energy security is.
"We just talk about power poles going down, people being disconnected from electricity in a cyclone and blackouts like the black system event in South Australia.
"But we don't really address some of the root causes of our security."
Overhead vs underground power
Josh Stabler, who owns and runs consultancy Energy Edge from Brisbane, said the answers to those questions were not necessarily straightforward.
Mr Stabler said while the effects of events such as Cyclone Alfred could be widespread and damaging, they were also unpredictable and rare.
He noted it had been 50 years since south-east Queensland was last directly affected by a tropical cyclone.
Therefore, he said designing an electricity system that could easily withstand the hit from a cyclone could be considered overkill.
"We get the best electricity system we can afford, not the best electricity system we can build," Mr Stabler said.
Most obviously, Mr Stabler pointed out that overhead powerlines were a key weakness in many Australian networks.
Indeed, Energex and other network firms including Essential Energy in northern NSW pointed out that many of the disruptions to supply were being caused by trees falling on powerlines.
Despite this, Mr Stabler said Australia had built so many powerlines above ground because the costs of putting them below ground were so much greater.
He said there were exceptions to this rule such as Canberra, where a small and dense population made undergrounding power relatively easy to do and afford.
Elsewhere, however, he noted Australia's electricity network was notoriously "skinny", meaning it was spread thinly across vast distances to service a relatively small number of people.
"Queensland is an enormous state," he said.
"Powerlink owns the largest network of transmission lines in the world.
"If you were to put that underground, it would be so wide-ranging in its impacts.
"It seems like a good idea, but the expense would just be insane."
Paul Budde, an independent telco analyst who is also based in Brisbane, said the nexus between phone and internet services and energy security was growing stronger all the time.
He said putting powerlines underground, where feasible, made overwhelming sense.
He said much of the power infrastructure in Western Europe was buried, making it much more resilient.
But he agreed with the costs being simply too high for many parts of Australia, especially those outside densely populated inner cities.
Even in 2010, he said, the costs of undergrounding conductors in metropolitan Perth amounted to about $4,500 per household — a figure that was only likely to have risen since then.
"In Australia, most of the network is above ground, particularly outside the big cities," Mr Budde said.
"And that makes it extremely vulnerable, and even more vulnerable as we get climate change and more ferocious storms, etc.
"So the importance of having a good network is critical.
"The current cyclone, there are 300,000 houses without electricity, so there are 300,000 houses without telecommunications."
The benefit of batteries
More likely, Mr Stabler said there were practical steps electricity providers could take to strengthen the system while not breaking the bank.
Chief among them is the adoption of batteries to help consumers — and the system more broadly — ride through the shocks of something like a cyclone.
According to Mr Stabler, medium-sized batteries that could be installed at a substation to serve an entire suburb or neighbourhood would offer the most benefits.
He said this was because the unit cost of the battery — or the price paid for each unit of energy a battery can store — would be relatively low for a medium-sized installation.
At the same time, he said they would allow households unable to get a battery — either because they were renters or could not afford it — to access the benefits of storage.
"Having batteries at a substation level will help communities," Mr Stabler said.
"Batteries in your home are a good idea but they're really expensive in terms of total installation costs.
"If you can make them consumer networked or grouped, there's a substantial cost benefit."
Echoing the comments, Mr Greet said adding more rooftop solar, batteries and other forms of so-called distributed energy resources would undoubtedly bolster the strength of the system.
He said it was only natural that spreading sources of generation and storage widely across an area would make it less vulnerable to the loss of any one power plant or line.
Mr Greet said a good example arose in the Black Summer bushfires that devastated the eastern states in 2019 and 2020.
Some towns such as Cobargo in southern NSW, he said, were badly exposed when fires severed the limited powerlines connecting them to the grid.
"That meant people couldn't get petrol, they couldn't get money, they were completely vulnerable," Mr Greet said.
"One of the lessons out of that was that communities may well be better with distributed energy resources.
"And by that I mean solar, community wind and batteries and, if I was to be futurist-thinking and even handed, small modular (nuclear) reactors.
"But this allows the community to have the assurance of energy during an emergency."
Telco analyst Paul Budde said efforts should also go into making Australia's electricity networks "smarter".
For example, he said this could allow poles-and-wires companies to remotely tell when powerlines were brought down rather than having to rely on crews driving out to inspect an area.
He said that would make repairing lines quicker and easier.
Given the link between telecommunications and energy, Mr Budde said more could be done to bolster mobile networks to "overcome" problems that affected the power system.
He said this was already happening at mobile towers where generators and other facilities were being rolled out to ensure services could either withstand a shock or resume operations more quickly.
Similarly, he said there was significant potential for satellites to provide a back-up.
"What you will see over the next five to 10 years is more of these satellites will be able to link directly into mobile networks," he said.
