SEVERAL hundred properties on the Blackdown Hills above Wellington were without power on Saturday afternoon (August 15) after a second huge outage hit the national landscape area in six weeks.

More than 400 homes and businesses in the village of Bishopswood and the surrounding area were affected by Saturday’s outage, which started just after 2 pm.

In early July, nearly a thousand customers were cut off for about two hours due to a high voltage power line fault in a triangular area between Hemyock, Churchinford, and West Buckland.

National Grid Electricity Distribution (NGED) said the Bishopwood incident was also the result of a fault on overhead high voltage power lines.

After estimating properties would be back on supply by 4 pm, it revised the timing and said it was likely to take until 8.30 pm before all customers were reconnected.

A total of 442 properties were affected.

An NGED spokesperson said: “We are getting this sorted as a priority.

“Power may go on and off while we work hard to sort this out.

“Our engineers are working to get electricity back on as quickly as possible.

“We are sorry for the disruption.

“We give our best estimate for when power will be back on, based on what we know at the time.

“Times might change if we face unexpected challenges getting to the fault.

“These times show when the last person in the area will have power back - most will be reconnected before this.”