A FIFTH power outage struck the Wellington area last week.

National Grid say the incidents are unrelated.

At 3am on Thursday, July 3, a power outage hit the Tonedale area of Wellington, affecting 2,633 properties.

The cause, unlike previous incidents, was reportedly due to a fault with an underground cable.

A spokesperson for National Grid Electricity Distribution said: “Power supplies have been restored in Wellington after an outage that began at 3.21am affecting 2,633 properties.

“Supplies were restored to nearly 1,300 properties in three minutes and to another 1,223 customers just after 4.30am, with everyone restored by 9.17am.”

The town has been affected by similar outages since June 9, when 8,200 homes and businesses were cut off following third party damage to the network.

Subsequent faults were caused by farming equipment hitting an overhead power line, ‘overhead power line issues’, and a ‘fuse fault on [the] high voltage network.’

The spokesperson added: “We apologise for this disruption, the cause of which was a fault with an underground cable.

“We’d like to thank customers for bearing with us during this incident which is unrelated to others in the area recently.”