Had a trip up to Northumberland about 2 months back house hunting. Nice part of the country. Noticed that a lot of the o/h network hadn't been upgraded. From some of the photos on the news it also seemed they hadn't carried out any tree trimming adjacent to the damaged network. A reliable source said they had very few o/h line staff to deal with the damage from the storm, my former company sent some 200 staff up there to help out under and industry wide mutual aid agreement. Even so customers off for almost 2 weeks(?) is, quite frankly, in excusable.
To compound the problem it appeared the DNO's customer liaison and messaging was also an issue. It never ceases to amaze me, when ever there's an incident such as this, the appalling level of communication by who ever owns the organisation. Sadly it's not as simple as telling customers their power is going off beforehand, they should engage with them beforehand to explain how it all works. Or not.
No doubt lessons will be learned. I mean it's not as if we've never had extreme weather incidents of this nature in this country before, that affect the distribution infrastructure a mostly o/h network.
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