Homes in Rochester suffered a power cut yesterday and some people were without power for almost nine hours in freezing temperatures.

People living in the village of Borstal suffered the outage at about 6.45pm as temperatures plummeted to -4C.

Most homes and shops in the area were reconnected to the power about 15 minutes after it went off, but some were still not connected hours later.

The outage was caused by a problem at a sub-station when there was a fault with an underground cable, and engineers arrived on site to get the problem fixed at about 7.40pm.

However, at 9.50pm some people’s homes had still not been restored and engineers continued working though the night to restore their power as soon as they could.

The last few homes in the area had their power restored by about 4am.

A spokesman for UK Power Networks said: “Following a fault on an underground electricity cable at 6.49pm supplies were restored to the vast majority of customers within 15 minutes, with power being restored to 3,202 customers in stages by just after 7pm.

"A further 20 customers had power again by 11.15pm and the final 11 were back on supply at 3.58am today.

“We realise how cold it was last night and understand how uncomfortable it must have been for those without power. We would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience caused.”