A blaze ripped through a substation in Poplar
(Picture: Twitter/LondonFire)Hundreds of homes and businesses across London were still without power 24 hours after a blaze ripped through an electricity substation triggering rush hour transport chaos.
The fire on Tuesday caused the closure of major road links including the Blackwall, Rotherhithe and Limehouse tunnels as traffic lights lost power, while the Docklands Light Railway was also disrupted by the outage.
Although the transport system was back to normal for the morning rush hour on Wednesday, many homes and businesses in more than 40 different postcode districts were still without power in the afternoon.
UK Power Networks, which runs the electricity in London, published a map of areas hit by power cuts across London earlier in the day.
The blaze in the substation in Poplar was the main cause of the blackouts, but another major electricity cable also failed leaving engineers scrambling to repair the damage.
The map shows that east London, near where the substation caught fire in Poplar, was badly hit with major outages reported as far east as Rainham.
Bromley in the south-east was suffering while Barnet in the north was also affected.
Most customers had power restored by 3.45pm on Wednesday, more than 24 hours after the substation blaze at 12.48pm on Tuesday.
The substation fire and power cut was estimated to have originally caused problems for 38,000 people. Power has now been restored to the vast majority of those, with engineers working round the clock to reconnect all customers.
Londoners expressed their frustration on social media.
One wrote: “I wasn’t even supposed to go into the office today but a bloody power cut made me and now I’m in the Chinese a few pints down spending way too much money and getting prepared to be too drunk than I should be.”
Another said: “The power, Internet and water is still off in our part of #Limehouse, after almost ten hours, so we’ve made the typically British response to a time of national crisis and decamped to Wetherspoons #E14 #powercut.”
A third added: “When is this power cut gonna be sorted out??? I can’t take this any longer.”
UK Power Networks said the blackouts were caused by a fault on a high voltage underground electricity cable as well as the substation blaze.
A statement said: “Power supplies were restored to the E1 and E14 areas at around 5am today after a substation fire yesterday. Since that time we have turned power off to a small number of customers while additional work takes place. We advice anyone who is still without power to contact us on 105.”
