Storms accompanied by very strong winds they cost the life of a man and deprived thousands of households of electricity eastern Australia, authorities announced today.

The severe weather hit the state of Victoria on Tuesday, with torrential rain and wind gusts of more than 150 kilometers per hour, according to emergency services.

A Pennine rancher has been killed by the bad weather — first reports say he was hit by flying debris while driving a tractor — east of Melbourne, authorities said during a news conference.

The winds also spread fires in low vegetation in the Grabians, west of Melbourne, with the result that an unspecified number of houses in the town were also burned.

At its peak, more than half a million homes and businesses were without power, according to the Australian Energy Market Administrator. Some 285,000 people were still without electricity this morning.

The strong winds carried away roofs of buildings, uprooted trees and poles and pillars tth electricity distribution network, according to local media and images shared by users of social networking sites.

Falling transmission pylons shut down Victoria’s largest coal-fired thermal power station, Loy Yang A. It has now been reconnected to the grid, the regulator assured the state.

It was one of Victoria’s “biggest outages in history,” said Lily D’Ambrosio, the state’s energy minister.

In addition, lightning “caused fires” in the state, according to an emergency services official.

Authorities now assure that they are focusing their efforts on restoring electricity and assessing the extent of damage caused by the fires. The alarms that had been declared have now all been lifted.