2 September 2005
Central Networks, formerly Midlands Electricity and East Midlands Electricity, has announced that electric power has been restored to its customers.
The network was struck by lightning more than 5,500 times in a lightning storm that hit the region on the night of August 31st, cutting off 53,389 households across the East Midlands.
Most customers were quickly re-connected, and only 2,000 remained without power by the morning of September 1st, the majority of whom were located in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire.
The company's customer operations director, Jim Lightfoot, explained: "We used our special lightning tracker to monitor the lightning storm closely as it moved across the region.
"We could clearly see where the hot spots were and which areas were hit the most. This information is vital and means we can get our engineers out to the worse affected areas and get those customers without power back on supply as quickly as we can."
Northamptonshire and Warwickshire were the counties worst affected, with 21,078 and 14,957 customers disrupted respectively.
Central Networks has 4.8 million customers across the East and West Midlands. It operates 133,000km of underground and overhead cables, passing through some 97,000 substations.
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