DALBEATTIE Residents have been plagued by power cuts for the last three months.
Electricity has shut down nine times in the Maxwell Park area of the town in the last 12 weeks, plunging nearly 50 homes into darkness and affecting central heating supplies in the coldest months of the year.
Homes have been without power for between four and six hours each time.
At the height of the cuts, some houses were without any heat or light for 18 hours, when power switched off at 10am and stayed off until 4am the next day.
“It has been absolutely terrible,” said Barbara Tattersfield, who has had to turn guests away from her bed and breakfast.
“Before Christmas it was off about seven or eight times and it turns everything off.
“We are lucky to have an old gas fire but otherwise you can’t cook, can’t shower – it’s terrible.”
Thomas Anderson had to survive freezing winter temperatures in his home during the power failures.
He said: “During a particularly cold spell we had no control of our heating when it was at minus three degrees.
“We can’t cook when the power is out and had to go out for meals twice. We can’t watch TV or listen to the radio and we are totally unreachable as our phone line goes off.”
ScottishPower confirmed that there was a problem causing the frequent blackouts and that they have now repaired the fault.
A spokesperson said: “There was a transient fault on a cable near the Maxwell Park substation causing short outages.
“We had to bring in a fault finder and after the engineers found the fault they did a permanent repair on the cable on December 17.
“We know there was another fault on January 20 but that was unrelated.
“It is very rare to have two separate faults in the same area around the same time and we apologise for any inconvenience caused and assure residents that our engineers have been out and everything is completely repaired.”
