By RUTH LOGNONNE

Published at 09:44, Friday, 12 February 2010

POWER to a remote North Tyne village was cut off on Tuesday morning for more than three hours.

Villagers in Stonehaugh lost their electricity supply at 9am, as NEDL carried out maintenance work on power lines.

The only problem was, the power company hadn't told them what was happening.

Villager Moira Alderson said: “We were left scratching our heads. We didn’t know anything, we just thought, because it was snowing like crazy, a branch had come down and interfered with one of the wires.

“Then we realised NEDL vans weren’t racing around trying to find out what the problem was.

“We only found out what happened after the lights came back on.”

Since the power cut Mrs Alderson has received a letter from NEDL offering her £20 compensation.

She said: “My husband and I didn’t have to go to work, but I’d hate to think how much trouble it would have caused for working parents whose children needed to go to school.”

A spokesman for NEDL said: “At just before 9.30am on Tuesday we cut the electricity supply to around 50 properties in the area to allow our workers to trim trees which were encroaching on power lines, potentially damaging them.

“Usually in these circumstances, we give local residents several days’ notice, so that they can make arrangements for while the power is off.

“However, on this occasion, the notification letters were not delivered and we are currently investigating why this failure occurred.

“As soon as we noticed the error, we began to restore electricity supplies again and door-knocked the properties affected to let residents know.

“Everybody’s power was back on by 11.30am.

“We offer our sincere apologies to this unacceptable lapse in our usually high standards of customer service and promise that we will learn from our mistake.”

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk