ENGINEERS working to restore power to Dumfries and Galloway were yesterday visited by SP Energy Networks CEO Nicola Connelly to see the issues here first hand.
At the time of her visit, 800 customers were still without electricity locally .
However, as a result of last Friday’s visit from Storm Eowyn, that number had initially been 45,000 in this region alone, classed as the worst affected in Scotland.
Ms Connelly stressed 97 per cent were back on supply and most of those had been dealt with in the first 24 hours.
Speaking at Kelton, she said: “There has been absolutely no let-up in our efforts since first thing on Friday to restore power as quickly and safely as possible to the thousands of customers affected by Storm Eowyn. We’ve used every resource at our disposal and drafted in people and resources from across the country – and other companies – to tackle every single fault and we’ve made positive progress.
“We’re now in that final stretch to get all remaining customers back on. While the numbers off have reduced, we’re still managing almost 200 individual faults in Dumfries and Galloway alone.
“That means, on average, we’re restoring a handful of customers at a time, which is one of the biggest challenges we have at this point in our response. Every customer back on supply is a step in the right direction, but every job takes time. Our teams are also continuing to face what’s called ‘nested’ faults – several faults on a single circuit, which only come to light when we fix the initial one.
“I’m grateful to our customers for their patience and resilience. We will not stop until the lights are back on for every single one of them.”
Meanwhile, SPEN say the electricity network in central and southern Scotland sustained more than 100 days’ worth of faults in under three days and call centres handled over 92,000 calls – three months’ worth of calls in four days.
And the focus is now switching to compensation, with reimbursement information available on their website.
