UK Power Networks recently assisted teams in North East England and Scotland to help restore power to homes without electricity following Storms Malik and Corrie.
Thousands of homes were left without power following continuous high winds, with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) noting that 114,500 of its customers in Scotland had suffered a power outage. That led to teams from UK Power Networks being deployed.
Eighty-six specialist staff and contractors usually based in the East of England and the South East travelled to Aberdeen and Newcastle during Sunday and Monday to join the industry’s collaborative national response to the storm damage.
Brian Stratton, Head of Distribution Capital Delivery at UK Power Networks, commented, “Although these two storms did not have a significant impact on our networks, other parts of the country experienced the full force of the damaging winds.
“We know from personal experience how important industry collaboration is to restore power to customers quickly and safely.”
Richard Gough, Director of Distribution System Operations at SSEN, added, “The combined impact of Storm Malik and Corrie on the electrical infrastructure in the North of Scotland proved to be catastrophic; causing widespread damage and significant disruption for our customers.
“Without our industry’s tried and tested mutual aid support agreement – and associated support from UK Power Networks and other Distribution Network Operators – our repair and restoration efforts would have taken longer.
“We are very grateful for this support and the individual sacrifices people made to help restore power to our customers as quickly and safely as possible.”
Andy Bilclough, Northern Powergrid’s Director of Field Operations, concluded, “We’re very grateful to UK Power Networks and its teams for the support they provided. Their teams arrived promptly and fully equipped to help us tackle the overhead line repair work we had to complete to restore power to all our customers by Tuesday night (1 February) after our region was hit by two storms back-to-back.
“Restoring power to 80,000 customers after Storm Malik was challenging enough without having to deal with a smaller storm adding 17,000 customers to the workload in the middle of our recovery effort. I’m proud of how our teams worked in partnership to support our customers and safely restore their power.”
