Thousands Without Power as Storms hit Australian state

 Wind gusts and storms lashed the Australian state of Victoria on Sunday, downing trees and causing power-outages for thousands of people.

Roughly 13,000 homes were without power across the country's second-most populous state and Melbourne's International Airport closed one of two runways, causing significant delays.

The outages come a week after severe storms and lighting strikes left all of South Australia state without power for nearly 24 hours, grinding industries to a halt.

An independent review into the South Australian blackout was launched on Friday, after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, of the conservative Liberal Party, blamed the state's high dependence on renewables for the outage.

Turnbull's assessment drew criticism from state leaders, who accused the prime minister of letting ideology drive his comments.

(Reporting by Jarni Blakkarly; Editing by Stephen Coates