Storm Eowyn: Power being restored to last homes in Northern Ireland after 'extremely hard' 11 days

​At time of writing on Monday afternoon, about 400 customers remained without power, and NI Electricity (NIE) told the News Letter that “we are on track for today’s deadline of restoring power to all customers”.

February 3 had been touted as some customers’ restoration date in the wake of the storm on January 24.

The reconnection of the last properties marks the end of an “extremely difficult” 11 days without power for some, said the head of the UFU.

William Irvine told the News Letter today that “I did hear of some dairy farmers in dire straits trying to get cows milked” without power.

Farmers who sought to hire generators found they were all already rented out, so the storm will serve as a lesson to many that they must have back-up power “standing by” in the future.

“It was a real challenge,” he said.

"To compound all the electricity problems, phone signals and internet connections became very variable and poor at the same time.”

Were NIE too slow getting the power up and running?

”I don’t know what to say on that one. It was that widespread and that severe, they cannot be prepared for that situation every weekend of the year,” he said.

"A lot of folk would’ve liked it fixed sooner, but there was a lot of hours’ work by NIE to get to where they got to."

At the peak, some 283,000 customers out of about 910,000 – in other words 31% of the total – had lost power in Northern Ireland.

But in Scotland over 300,000 customers lost power, and all were restored by last Thursday.

Asked why Northern Ireland took longer to fully restore, NIE’s network's operations manager Alex Houston said that though the absolute number of Scottish properties without power was higher, Northern Ireland saw a higher proportion of its properties cut off.

He also told the News Letter that whilst they had requested extra manpower from GB before the storm under their “mutual aid” arrangements, it wasn’t until afterwards that companies dispatched any.

NIE has about 800 field staff, and this was ultimately supplemented with over 400 from organisations outside the Province, arriving largely between the 26th and the 31st.

"Unfortunately they were seeing some element of the bad weather, so none of them were prepared to release resources ahead of the storm,” he said.

"Obviously some areas of Great Britain suffered as well. But those other areas in the south of England perhaps that weren't as badly affected were able to start releasing resources from I think it was the Sunday onwards."