HUNDREDS of homes and businesses in Wellington and the surrounding area were left without electricity overnight on Saturday evening into Sunday morning (June 21 and 22) after a third massive power failure in less than a fortnight.

Wellington’s Lidl supermarket was forced to evacuate customers when the power outage struck shortly after 5.30 pm on Saturday, many of whom then went to shop instead in the town’s Asda store.

The electricity cut also affected homes across the B3187 road on the nearby Cades estate and spread through Nynehead, Bradford on Tone, Oake, and toward Norton Fitzwarren.

National Grid, which apologised for the ‘inconvenience’, said more than 900 properties were affected and explained the problem lay with one of the overhead power lines on its low voltage network.

The company said customers might experience their power supply turning on and off for a time while the cables were fixed.

It was thought that the majority of properties were reconnected before midnight, but some remained cut off until 5 am on Sunday

On Friday, more than 9,200 properties were cut off across the whole of Wellington and Rockwell Green and surrounding villages, including Sampford Arundel, West Buckland, Nynehead, and Bradford on Tone.

Some were without power for as little as 10 minutes, while others in remoter areas went more than five hours before their electricity was restored.

National Grid said the outage was caused by equipment being used by a farmer in a field hitting an overhead power line.

Previously, more than 8,200 properties in a broadly similar area were cut off on Monday, June 9, which National Grid said was due to ‘third party damage to our network’.

It took engineers more than 15 hours before the last of the affected properties was reconnected in the early hours of the following morning.