Up to 100,000 Irish households may remain without power into the first week of February following “unprecedented damage to the electricity network by Storm Éowyn”, the ESB has said today.
“Storm Éowyn brought unprecedented, widespread and extensive damage to electricity infrastructure resulting in 768,000 customers losing supply on January 24th,” the State-owned electricity operator said.
“This is by far the worst storm experienced by ESB Networks both in terms of customers losing supply and the scale of damage across the network.”
The agency said that as of 12 noon today, ESB Networks had restored electricity supply to 438,000 homes, farms and businesses, with 330,000 customers remaining without power days after the initial storm.
“We anticipate that the vast majority of customers who lost power during Storm Éowyn have supply restored by Friday night, 31st of January,” the operator continued, adding that “as many as 100,000 customers” could have their power restored “progressively” over the course of the first week of February.
“Crews have continued to work in difficult conditions through Storm Herminia today: while this storm hasn’t caused significant damage to the network, it is hampering power restoration efforts in places,” the ESB said.
“Power restoration efforts will remain dynamic and weather conditions may impact on the restoration work.”
Commenting on the ongoing situation, Aontú leader Peadar Toibín said that the outages were “a crisis” and that it “does not make sense” that “the Dáil is going to be on holidays for much of this period of time” after adjourning for 2 weeks on Wednesday following the election of a new Government.
“There’s no doubt that this is a crisis for hundreds of thousands of premises at the moment,” Toibín said.
“Many of these individuals are older people and businesses in need of electricity – businesses that have frozen goods, for example, that are not going to last.
“This is a crisis, and we need to make sure the Government utilises all the facilities it has to get these premises reconnected as soon as possible. It needs to go into the private sector if necessary to make sure that this happens – we can’t wait until the 5th of February to have reconnections happening.”
Earlier today the Government announced that many local authorities across the country will be establishing “Emergency Response Hubs” in the worst effected areas to assist people with basic needs such as water, hot food, phone charging, broadband access, shower and clothes washing facilities, and more.
“Not all local authorities will need to establish Emergency Response Hubs/Local Coordination Groups – Local authorities are best placed to gauge the level of response required in their areas,” the Government added in a statement.