Retail park hit by power fault

Bybrook Sainsbury’s was forced to close after an underground fault on a high voltage cable saw its power shut off.

About 400 homes and shops were left without power on Monday lunchtime following the outage.

This included all stores on the Warren Retail Park off Simone Weil Avenue, which is home to Sainsbury’s, M&S Food and Home Bargains.

Even after Sainsbury’s managed to reopen, customers could only use self-service tills while staff worked to bring full services back.

A spokeswoman for UK Power Networks said engineers were sent to the affected areas.

She said: “Our engineers worked as quickly and safely as possible to restore electricity to about 400 customers in Ashford following an underground fault on a high voltage cable at 12.25pm.

“All but one customer was back on by 1.23pm with the final customer reconnected at 4pm.

“We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”