A ‘miserable’ Christmas for many Tyrone families after power cut

MORE than 800 homes in Aghyaran were left in the dark as power cuts resulted in a ‘miserable’ Christmas Day for some families.

From 3pm on December 25, several hundred houses were stripped of electric in the area. Luckily for many, the power returned within an hour, but dozens of other properties were left in the dark until the later hours of the night.

One Aghyaran woman, Kate Browne, was forced to scrap her much-anticipated family dinner, resorting to soup and prawns on the hob.

“Our Christmas Day was just miserable,” she said.

“Our electric went out at 3pm and didn’t fully return until nearly nine that night. By the time the electric went out, our turkey was already in the oven so we had to scrap that. We had no kettle to boil water either, so there was no tea either.

“We still had our gas hob, though, so our Christmas dinner was some soup, egg mayonnaise, and prawn cocktail.”

‘SITTING IN DARKNESS’

Another local woman, Aoife McHugh, said that she returned to her home with her family ‘sitting in darkness’, but still made light of the situation.

“I arrived home shortly after 3pm after collecting my boyfriend from Omagh and was met by my family sitting in darkness. We were lucky enough that our turkey and ham was finished, but nothing else. We sat and opened presents to pass the time, but when it got darker we had every candle in the house lit up for light, even the good scented ones,” said Aoife.

“We have no phone signal in our area, so we had no idea of the full extent of how many people were affected in Aghyaran. We got lucky enough when the power came back on at 7pm, which allowed us to cook the veg and other side dishes, and we finally had our dinner. Shortly after we finished eating, the electric went back off again and didn’t come back on until 2am.”

ISOLATED

Local councillor Caroline Devine, who was also briefly left powerless on Christmas Day, said that the joint disruption of electric and poor phone signal left families ‘isolated’.

“When there’s no electric, there’s nothing. People were left without ovens to make their dinner, no WiFi to contact their families, and there is no good phone signal either,” Cllr Devine said.

“It just left a lot of people isolated, especially in a rural area like Aghyaran.

“But we are grateful for the workers from NIE who came out all day from their own Christmas celebrations to fix the problem in our area,” she added.

A NIE spokesperson said: “Just before 3pm on Christmas Day, there was a power outage in the Castlederg/Aghyaran area that affected 866 customers. The outage was caused by a broken electric pole that needed replacing in the area and sections of the network were shut to try and locate the fault.”