Power cuts leave nearly 1,000 Northumberland homes without electricity - some for over 12 hours

More than 700 homes in the Longhoughton and Boulmer area were left without electricity - some for over 12 hours - along with some 200 on Holy Island in what was a separate incident.

A spokeswomen from Northern Powergrid said: “At around 11.30am yesterday (28 July) 715 customers in the NE66 (Longhoughton and Boulmer) area were affected by a power cut caused by a fault on our electricity network.

"Our network control engineers tried to switch supplies back on remotely – however due to the complexity of the fault this was not possible and resulted in customers going on and off supply and we could not feed a number of local substations from alternative routes on our network.

“We deployed our teams locally into the community and they were able to carry out work to enable 104 customers to be restored by around 9pm last night.

"Whilst working to locate the cause and coordinate some initial repairs to help get some customers back on supply, we also organised for several local substations to be energised by generators so we could get customers’ power restored.

"The teams worked into the night and by around 2am a further 223 customers’ supplies were restored and then another 61 by around 4am by generators.

"Fresh teams were deployed first thing this morning and they worked to ensure the remaining generators were connected and all 327 customers still affected were back on supply by around 11.30am.

“We have had a large number of teams on site throughout and our Customer Service Vehicle was in the community this morning to support local people who had been most affected.

"We would like to thank our customers for their patience whilst our teams worked hard to restore their supplies. We are now proactively writing to those customers who were affected more than 12 hours and, in line with industry guaranteed standards, offering them a payment to apologise and recognise the disruption.”

Meanwhile, engineers from SP Energy Networks were called to Holy Island around 3.30pm on Wednesday due to a network cable fault and worked until the early hours to restore power.

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