Householders living in the Keswick area have been experiencing intermittent short duration cuts in their electricity supply over the past three weeks which has been impacting on their everyday lives.
Frustrated residents have formed a Facebook group called Keswick Power Cuts and the town’s emergency response co-ordinator Claire Peat has been alerted as a potential major power outage is high on the list of events to prepare for with Cumberland Council.
She has requested a map of all the substations to see which properties are supplied by what. She has also asked if Electricity North West (ENW) has a contact outside of the customer service department that might be able to talk through the issues, and what a worst case scenario might look like for planning purposes.
The matter was raised by Cllr Louise Dunn at the November meeting of Keswick Town Council and she said that people who had reported the issue to ENW had been left feeling “fobbed off”.
She said that people working from home on online systems were losing work that they had done when their computers had gone off, electric clocks were requiring a reboot, cookers were needing resetting and in one case an emergency generator was brought in by ENW for someone on a dialysis machine.
Cllr Dunn said that her mother was without a cooker for two days as many modern day cookers will not work until the electric clock is reset and she thought hers had broken
“This is not just a few houses being affected, this is a large part of east Keswick that is experiencing this,” said Cllr Dunn. “Hopefully we can all get together and find out what is going on through reporting it to Electricity North West and we can get onto Ofgem if there is not an appropriate response.”
The short burst power cuts have been reported by residents in Millfield Gardens, Latrigg Close, Penrith Road, Netherfield, Chestnut Park, Goosewell Farm, Windebrowe Avenue, Hawthorns, Threlkeld and Threlkeld Quarry.
One of those impacted is consultant Tony Nicholls who works from home at Threlkeld Quarry most or all of the week. He says that he has a lot of internal business and external client calls most days.
“These calls involve meeting new clients, fact finding their issues and proposing ways of supporting them. They can involve complex negotiations and relationship building is paramount,” he said. “I am heavily reliant on broadband for both my administrative work and video calls.
“Short interruptions in power don’t affect my laptop, which has a battery backup but only as long as the power cut is less than an hour or so.
“The problem lies with the broadband router. Even a short loss of power results in this shutting down and a loss of Wi-Fi connection. Reboot times can be a few minutes. This results in calls being cut off and a delay before they can be reconnected. With client calls this can be very disruptive.”
He said that when a previous cut happened he was off line for 20 minutes or so. “I was in the middle of a workshop with clients,” he said. “The participants were able to self-organise and hold a conversation whilst they waited for me to return. Thankfully this was a group I had been working with for a while so we laughed it off.
“With a newer group, they may have been less forgiving. Everyone makes allowances for tech challenges in the new hybrid world, but this is an added risk we could do without.”
The Keswick Reminder contacted ENW for a response on Monday but had not heard back at the time of going to press. The company had been in touch with a resident to say that there was probably a cut in the cable somewhere adding that: “A fault is brewing on the network.”
The resident was told that the only way to remedy this was for there to be “a complete break” in the system and until that happens, any action on their part would be “like looking for a needle in a haystack”.
“So basically we are waiting for a big power cut before it can be fixed,” said Cllr Dunn. “The Keswick Emergency Response role would usually be to get involved after a major outage of significant duration, but Claire is seeing what she can do before that happens.”
The Keswick Emergency response team would like to be alerted to any major disruptions, or know if this is affecting anyone that’s on the vulnerable register that may be more challenged than your average household. Louise can raise with the local council, and Claire will dig away at the wider resilience network.
Those affected are urged to raise a complaint with Electricity North West at [email protected] or contact Ofgem at [email protected]
