A quarter of a million homes in Victoria are still unable to drink from their taps after a wild storm led to contaminated water supplies.
Authorities are urging people in 99 suburbs across Melbourne's north and east to boil their tap water in case of any possible contamination of the water supply.
"We had a pretty severe storm event on Friday night and Thursday morning and it affected the disinfection process at the water damn," Pat McCafferty from Yarra Valley Water told Today.
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Authorities have reassured people the measures are precautionary. Mr McCafferty said he risk of illness from drinking the tap water is "very, very low".
"It is a gastric-type illness but we haven't had any gastro in the background so far. It is really precautionary but just to be safe," he said.
"The water is high quality because we have protective catchments."
With many homes also without power, Victorians have rushed to supermarkets to buy bottled water causing another round of panic buying in impacted areas.
Mr McCafferty reassured people that boiling water is a "perfectly safe option".
"There were some suburbs that didn't have power and I certainly understand the need for those people to get bottled water. We are providing people with bottled water if they don't have power and can't boil their water they can contact us and there are water tankers out in suburbs as well," he said.
Mr Cafferty said authorities were working as quickly as possible to resolve the issue and said he was "hopeful" the issue would be resolved today.
"It is a massive network and we are working through tracking the water and testing the samples and flushing systems and retesting. We are getting those results progressively today. We are hopeful that the system is resolved today.
"We just want to be quite conservative."
Eleven new suburbs were added to the list last night including Belgrave, Belgrave Heights, Belgrave South, Boronia, Ferntree Gully, Knoxfield, Lysterfield, Selby, Tecoma, The Basin, Tremont, Upper Ferntree Gully, Upwey.
The storm also resulted in three deaths, including a four-year-old boy, in the disastrous storm overnight, with a mass clean-up still underway.
The SES received close to 2000 calls for help, most of those being in Melbourne's east and south-east, and 95,000 residents lost power.
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