MORE than 1,500 homes and businesses lost power at lunchtime on Sunday (March 22) across a large area of Wellington.

The outage happened just before 12.30 pm and affected the town centre and much of the north of Wellington.

It was the tenth major power cut in the area in the past nine months and comes just a fortnight after National Grid said it was working on ‘several upgrade schemes’ to improve the resilience of electricity supplies.

National Grid said Sunday’s power cut was caused by a fault on the high voltage power lines in the area.

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

“Our engineers are working to get your 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.”

More than 1,000 properties had their power restored within minutes, while National Grid said the remaining 400-plus should be connected again by 2 pm.