Power is restored to 4,000 homes after storm outages
APPROXIMATELY 4,000 homes, farms and businesses were left without power during the peak of Storm Emma as a result of damage to the electricity network in County Wicklow.
The most badly impacted areas were smaller communities based on higher ground across rural east and west Wicklow.
With many roads impassable, crews worked hard in extreme weather conditions to restore power across the county.
Thousands of homes in Wicklow town, Brittas Bay, Rathnew and Ashford were without electricity during the height of the storm on Thursday night from just before 11 p.m. A fault at the sub-station in Ballybeg was responsible and most of the homes impacted had power restored by 3 a.m. On Friday, 27 houses in Little Bray suffered outages. A fault at Kilmagig left 1,223 homes in the general
The council has taken the approach of clearing roads from the top down – first the regional roads down to secondary and then local roads and has been trying to keep local staff in each local area.
‘We are conscious not to redeploy staff out of their areas as they are still needed in more rural areas,’ he added.
According to Mr Quirke, there are some areas of the county which, on Tuesday, were still under a very thick blanket Aughrim area without power. The problem started at 9.34 a.m. and was fixed by around 6 p.m.
Ninety-nine customers were impacted by a fault at Tinahask, which lasted for around five hours.
All but 120 customers, located in pockets in the south of the county near Arklow and around Aughavannagh, were restored by Saturday evening. In the case of relatively isolated high ground around Aughavannagh, a specialist tractor was deployed from Portlaoise to connect customers.
With Wicklow clear on Saturday, some crews from Arklow then moved south into Wexford, where the situation was much worse, to assist with the effort there.
An ESB spokesperson said: ‘We are really grateful for the help and patience shown by of snow and in need of machinery to clear the significant drifts experienced.
‘Areas around Blessington and Manor Kilbride and other parts of west Wicklow down to Knockananna, Tinahely and Aughavannagh are still very bad and we are doing our utmost to get them cleared as quickly as possible,’ he said.
On Tuesday, a number of roads remained impassable, including from Roundwood to Laragh and up through the all in Wicklow who lost power over the last few days. This has been a team effort with great help from all of our partners across the county. We would particularly like to thank Wicklow County Council and acknowledge the nationwide efforts of the Defence Forces, An Garda Siochána, the HSE, Civil Defence and all of the other people and agencies that assisted our staff in the cold weather over the last few days. We all understand how difficult it is to be without electricity in times like this.
Members of the public are still advised to take care.
‘We urge everyone to remain vigilant as there may still be some low hanging electricity wires that have not yet been reported to us. Please contact us at 1850 372 999 with concerns about low wires, trees touching wires or wires on the ground.’ Sally Gap, Kilbride, Glencree, from Askinagap to Ballygobban looping around to Knocknashamroge and down to Moyne, near Rathshanmore and Hill Picket near Avoca.
Yesterday, the council appealed to local farmers and plant hire contractors to work with council staff to get roads cleared in the remaining areas and extended thanks to the public for the ‘magnificent response to tackling the after-effects of this unprecedented weather event’.