Following yesterday's incident at St Clements Gardens, Walpole Road and Hamilton Road in Bournemouth, SSEN has been working through the night with the emergency services and other partners to support its customers who may have been affected.
At around 6.40pm yesterday evening, a fault on SSEN's high voltage network resulted in approximately 470 customers losing supply. Since the initial incident call, SSEN has worked continuously with all of the responding agencies to ensure the safety of the community and to restore electricity supplies to as many customers as possible. Following initial investigations, SSEN believe the incident was caused by equipment failure in the local high voltage substation. What caused the piece of equipment to fail is not yet known and investigations are ongoing.
As of 11.30pm yesterday, SSEN safely restored power to approximately 200 customers and there are currently around 270 customers who remain off supply. SSEN has developed a plan to restore these remaining electricity supplies and additional engineers and support staff have been mobilised to ensure this is done as soon as possible.
SSEN will be checking the integrity of the electrical installation at each property before restoring supplies and will need access to each property to complete these essential safety checks. SSEN is encouraging property owners and customers to make themselves known to SSEN staff on site to provide the necessary access. This will ensure that the required safety checks are completed to help engineers restore supplies as soon as possible and a mobile generation unit is on site and ready to reconnect supplies to the remaining properties as soon as all safety checks have been completed.
To support those customers affected, a mobile catering van has been deployed to provide free food and drinks and a welfare van is also on hand to provide extra support to those customers still off supply, both located outside St Clements School. SSEN has also been proactively contacting its priority services customers to offer extra support where required.
Customers should contact SSEN by calling 105 or make themselves known to SSEN's team on the ground if they have any related ongoing concerns.
Further updates will be provided later today.