Thousands of residents have been left without electricity after two separate power cuts.

Engineers were scrambled to the ME5 area of Chatham to fix the faulty underground cable.

UK Power Networks says it was alerted to the fault shortly after 4.30pm, in a message sent to residents.

Meanwhile, they are also working to fix a separate fault in the ME9 area, which covers Newington and other surrounding villages.

Residents have been warned it could take hours to restore electricity.

UK Power Networks says more than 2,300 homes were originally impacted by the outage in the Chatham area, which has impacted those in Blue Bell Hill and Walderslade.

But in an update shortly after 5.30pm, it said: “Our staff are working as quickly as they can to get the lights back on, and they have advised us there are now 259 properties still affected.

“They have managed to get a further 598 of our customers back on by diverting electricity, so your power may have come on sooner than we originally advised.”

Power is estimated to be restored between 7.30pm and 8.30pm.

Engineers have also been called to Newington and believe there is a fault with substation equipment in the high street area.

“We did not know this was going to happen, so the timeframes we provide throughout are estimated and are subject to change,” UK Power Networks said.

“Our estimated time to have power back on is currently between 10pm and 11pm, but after we arrive on site and assess the situation this may change.

“The reason for this is there can sometimes be a more complex underlying issue found from our engineers' tests which may take longer, and if there is not we may get power back on sooner.”