Payments to customers following storms are set nationally by energy regulator Ofgem, depending on the severity of the incident. Storm Arwen is classed as a ‘category 2’ storm, meaning you are eligible for payments of £70 if you have been without power for 48 hours, plus a further £70 for each additional 12-hour period that you are off supply. A previous cap of £700 has now been removed.
We will review all applications and will make payments to eligible customers as soon as reasonably practicable. This is likely to take a few weeks and we will provide more information on our website over the next few days.
We worked with the British Red Cross and local resilience forums including councils and emergency services to provide extra help and support. Welfare centres were set up in some of the worst hit areas, providing hot food and respite. We also knocked on doors in remaining areas affected to provide help and advice and we have paid for food, travel and hotels for those who need it.
All our teams worked flat out throughout the incident to restore power and we drafted in additional teams from around the country too. We had over 800 separate incidents of damage on the network and every fault needed a team to attend and carry out full engineering repairs. We prioritised this work to reconnect the largest numbers of customers first and restored everyone as soon as possible.
Fixing faults is extremely labour-intensive and there’s no quick fix. The damage caused by Storm Arwen was even more widespread than the damage caused by Storm Desmond in 2015 and the Beast from the East in 2018.
We brought in helicopters to help us survey lines and have made hundreds of repairs, but continued to find additional damage. In some cases up to 3km of lines and poles have been decimated supplying a single group of customers, all of which needs to be repaired.
We cancelled all planned work so that all of our colleagues could help with our response to the incident, from responding to customer calls to coordinating the huge logistical challenge of managing our teams and equipment. Final repairs are still continuing.
We issued all generators available to restore power to customers where possible. Including generators that we brought up to Cumbria from as far away as Southampton.
Generators can only be connected to certain parts of the network for engineering reasons but did do this wherever we could.
We provided generators in critical situations and used them to provide power to some of the remaining properties where the network needs even more repair work.
Engineers who have worked on networks for more than 40 years have said that this is the worst storm they’ve ever seen.
We invest millions each year cutting back trees from overhead lines and upgrading poles and lines where needed to reduce the impact of storms. We can only cut back trees where we have permission from the landowner to do so.
We have 13,000km of overhead lines which take electricity to every property, often running through very exposed parts of our region. The winds caused enormous amounts of damage, not just in our area but in Scotland and the North East too, with more than a million people affected across the UK.
We brought in specialist engineers from networks unaffected by Storm Arwen, including from the south and the Isle of Man, to help with the complex engineering repairs to the network.
We discussed with our local resilience forums (including local councils and emergency services) how we could use the army for support for access, logistics, provision of generators and door knocking to support vulnerable customers but we were able to manage this locally through our partners, contractors and other non-operational members of staff with support from Cumbria Council and its resilience forums.
Three quarters of the North West’s power network is underground, the largest percentage of any network outside central London. We also have 13,000km of overhead lines which take electricity to every property, often running through very exposed parts of our region. All the costs of work on our network are ultimately paid for through customers’ bills and it is up to 10 times more expensive to install underground cables than overhead lines. Underground cables suffer less interruptions than overhead lines, but faults on these cables when they do happen take much longer to find and fix as the cables need to be excavated to access them. Underground line routes need to follow roads to enable access however digging up roads in rural locations can cause significant, long-term delays and impacts on the local economy and community. Ground conditions can also be an obstacle to installing underground cables in all areas. Throughout the UK overhead line routes have to date been the preferred option for network design in rural locations because they are considered better value, are easier to access if needed, and are less disruptive to install and maintain.
We had two months’ worth of calls in two days (over 60,000) at the peak of the incident and had to focus on prioritising those most in need, for example people who are medically reliant on electricity. Call waiting times have now reduced to a few minutes so please do call us on 105.