Teams tackle 72 hours of Storm Bert disruption

National Grid Electricity Distribution restored power to more than 300,000 customers during the three days of disruption caused by Storm Bert.

The second named storm of the autumn/winter brought nearly 70mph winds and hours of torrential rain to our region, with the South West badly affected.

Hundreds of engineers worked around the clock in difficult weather conditions to get the power back on, supported by control room teams managing the network in real-time as faults occurred.

Roisin Quinn, Field Operations Director, said: “Storm Bert’s high winds led to fallen trees affecting overhead lines and damage to transformers which caused power cuts in many areas.

“Over the course of 72 hours engineering teams tackled 2,500 incidents, many of which were high voltage issues. In some areas fallen trees and flooding made getting to sites difficult, but despite the sustained adverse conditions our engineers worked relentlessly to restore connections as quickly as possible.”

In some areas where outages were prolonged, teams provided battery packs for customers who were waiting for their supplies to be restored.

Extra employees were drafted in to support our contact centres as they helped answer more than 17,000 customer calls.

Emma Pamplin, Director of Customer Excellence, said: “Being without power during a storm can be a worrying experience and we’d like to thank customers affected by Storm Bert for their patience while supplies were restored. “Keeping in touch with customers with extra needs who are on our Priority Services Register was a key consideration for us during the storm. More than 35,000 customers were contacted to make sure they were safe and well.”