by Lynn Cox

More than 2,000 homes which were left without electircity after a power cut have had their supplies restored.

The power outage in Cliffe happened shortly after midnight (Dec 18) and effected about 2,200 customers.

EDF Energy said the cut was caused by a fault on the electricity distribution network and that just before 9am today engineers had managed to restore more than 1,300 supplies.

By about 10.10am the further 875 other homes and businesses also had their power restored.

So some people went without electricity for around 10 hours as the company was unable to get power restored quickly as engineers were having difficulty getting to substations to repair the fault, because of the snow.

A spokesman said: “At 12.10am on Friday, December 18, about 2,200 customers in the Cliffe area of Rochester experienced an interruption to their power supplies because of a fault on the electricity distribution network.

“EDF Energy Networks engineers restored supplies to more than 1,300 customers at 8.45am that morning and continued to work as quickly and as safely as possible to ensure that the remaining customers had power again as soon as was able.

“The final 875 customers had their power back on at 10.07am.

“We appreciate how difficult it can be to lose power, especially in cold weather, and would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience caused.

“The snow that has fallen in the region made travel conditions difficult for our engineers, it was harder for them to reach our substations and other parts of our network, which slowed down the restoration of supplies.

“We had additional call takers working from a number of centres but were are not indicate when power supplies would be restored and are concentrated on taking urgent safety calls.”

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