Traffic sign cause of East Ilsley power cuts
From Thursday, March 21, the village experienced four power cuts over the Easter bank holiday weekend.
A spokeswoman for Southern Electric, Hannah Gleaves, said that initially the problems had been caused by a “rogue circuit”, causing a loss of power for an hour and a half last Thursday, but a further fault caused 42 customers to lose power again for three hours the following day.
However, local resident and East Ilsley parish councillor, Andrew Sharp said that his power was lost for around 16 hours in total on Easter Saturday.
He said: “The power first went out at 4am, [SSE] said it should be back on by 2pm [but] it turned out to be a bigger fault.
“It was on and off then it was finally fixed at about 8 o’clock.
“It was a really cold day, we have got no gas in the village, it really did make a difference.”
He said the matter was made worse as a Thames Water pumping system, which also lost power, flooded sewage into the streets.
Ms Gleaves confirmed that the second fault had been caused by a road traffic sign, installed several years ago directly above its circuit, which had gradually harmed an underground cable and caused it to become flooded with water.
She said that the underground repairs had taken so long to repair because of the flooded grounds.
She added: “No further interruptions are expected.
“We would like to thank the customers for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience.”