400 Highland homes and businesses hit by power cuts

More than 400 homes Highland homes were without power on Thursday morning after two separate outages hit communities in the Great Glen and Caithness.

Some 266 homes and businesses were hit by a power cut in the Great Glen shortly after 7am.

The unplanned cut, which was due to a fault on the network, was centred on an area encompassing Loch Oich, Loch Garry and extending from the northern shores of Loch Lochy to Fort Augustus. The same outage also appeared to affect some homes in the areas of Gairlochy and Spean Bridge, further to the south.

At the time of writing Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) said it hoped to restore power by 10am, although this update was made while engineers were busy on another fault - so could slip until later.

Meanwhile, SSEN is hoping to restore power to around 130 Caithness homes by around 8am following an earlier outage centred on Reiss, Killimster, Winless and Hastigrow.

This outage, which occurred at 4.36am, was also caused by a fault on the network.

For the latest updates on both power outages, visit SSEN’s Powertrack web page.

Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.