Thaw deal at Tesco after powercut

December 2003

Hundreds of thousands of euro worth of frozen foods had be destroyed in Tesco’s Wexford store last week, after a power cut shut down the store’s freezers and cold rooms.

An accident on a neighbouring building site, in which a mains cable was struck by a digger, was this week being blamed for the power cut, which saw Tesco lose stock estimated at being worth up to €0.5 million.

According to a spokesman for the store, all of the frozen produce there had to be destroyed. ‘We are still working out the cost of the produce that had to be destroyed. It was substantial. In fact, it was very large indeed,’ he said.

The power cut came at 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and affected a number of businesses in the locality for 24 hours.

Tesco’s themselves installed a generator later on Wednesday night, however it was not in place in time to save the frozen stock.

‘It was a bit of a headache for us, to say the least,’ said the spokesman, although he added that things could have been worse. ‘ The man using the digger could have been killed. Luckily, that didn’t happen,’ he said.

On Monday, Kevin McDermott, the ESB Networks spokesperson, confirmed that the power failure was caused by ‘a third party’ who struck a mains cable during excavation work at Paul Quay.

As a result of this, there was damage to the substation at South Main Street, and it remained out of action for nearly 24 hours.