Wick street cordoned off and properties lose power after explosion blows out manhole cover
Witnesses say a manhole cover in Wick “blew 45ft in the air” during an incident in Wick on Sunday afternoon (June 15).
Dempster Street was cordoned off by police for a period after the cover was said to have flown high in the air and landed close to the Seaforth Highlanders Club.
Emergency services, including fire crews and police, attended the scene. Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) said that the event occurred shortly after 3pm and happened due to a cable fault on a section of the underground cable network in Dempster Street.
This fault caused the power to 23 nearby properties to go off, and all supplies were safely restored shortly before 6pm.
SSEN said its engineers were on site as quickly as possible after the fault occurred, and there have been no reports of any damage.
A spokesperson from SSEN Distribution said today (June 16): “We’d like to thank our customers in the Dempster Street area of Wick for their patience yesterday as our engineers worked hard to restore the supplies which were interrupted when a fault occurred on our nearby underground cables earlier that afternoon.”
There was no report of casualties due to the incident.
