Thousands without electricity in Donegal overnight were not told of scheduled work

Around 3,500 premises in Donegal Town, Mountcharles and Inver were without electricity for several hours overnight due to what was described as ‘a planned service interruption.’

There is much discontent in the area given that customers were not informed of this outage in advance, including those who signed up for text alerts relating to service interruptions in their area. 

The electricity supply was cut shortly after 1.30am on Sunday morning, with customers saying they had no warning.

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Three notices then appeared on the Powercheck.ie website and app, describing the outage as a planned service interruption, and saying: “We apologise for the loss of supply. We are carrying out essential improvement / maintenance works in your area and will restore power as quickly as possible.”

The total number of premises affected was 3,406. Furthermore, Donegal Town’s streetlights went out, leaving the town in total darkness at a time when many people were on the streets after a night out or were leaving their places of work in the hospitality sector. 

One woman who contacted Donegal Live said: “I often need oxygen during the night and I am in shock that this work was planned and I was not told. It was very stressful, sitting with a torch and praying that the power would come back on soon.

“Really, in this day and age there is no excuse for not letting people know if the power is going to be off when it is for planned work. I actually could not believe my eyes when I went onto the website to see what was happening, and saw that they knew full well that the power was being cut and did not tell us.”

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Others took to social media to vent their frustrations. As well as those who were inconvenienced in their homes, the dangers of the dark streets were also a cause for concern. 

One person posting to Facebook said: “It is bad enough in Donegal Town after a Saturday night out with all the people leaving the pubs and stumbling out onto the road but with no streetlights it was crazy, not to mention all the young ones who had to walk home in total darkness. It is just not safe. Why could they not tell us?”

The power supply was restored shortly before 4am.