More customers in the Highlands getting power restored after Storm Gerrit
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MORE customers in the Highlands are getting their power restored following Storm Gerrit. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) Distribution has just confirmed that at around 5pm 377 households in the north had still to be connected. The figure earlier in the day was 844, including around 150 in the Caithness area.
The company stressed that electricty supply has now been restored to more than 40,000 customers, with just over 2,900 properties without power. These are mainly due to faults which occurred later on Wednesday and in the early hours of Thursday morning. A total of 365 customers in Shetland are without power although that figure was much higher while just over a 1000 are waiting to be connected in north-east Scotland.
Improving conditions mean continued progress has been made to reconnect thousands of people who lost supplies, and SSEN’s operational teams have been further bolstered by the arrival of additional line crews from contractors and other network operators through Wednesday and Thursday.
The extent of the damage, combined with flooding and access issues, means around 1,500 customers will remain off supply into Friday, mainly in the north east and Shetland. SSEN’s customer service teams are calling affected customers to provide updated estimates of restoration and to check on their welfare.
Welfare vans serving free hot food and drink will remain open until 8pm this evening in locations where work is ongoing to restore supplies. SSEN said they include the car park beside the football pitch at Halkirk. The vans will reopen from 9am tomorrow morning.
Andy Smith, operations director at SSEN Distribution, said: "We’ve made the most of a lull in the stormy weather today to get thousands of our customers reconnected. This has been a difficult couple of days for the communities affected, and I’m grateful to them for their patience and support as our teams work extremely hard to restore power."
He added: "We’ve targeted our restoration plan on repairing the faults that will reconnect the greatest number of customers, and those who have been without power the longest. Where there are complex repairs or very localised faults, we expect around 1,500 homes will be without power until Friday. I’d like to reassure our customers that all our resources have been made available for this final push."
