Hundreds of homes and businesses in the Highlands were left without power for more than 14 hours today.
Power cuts were reported in parts of Inverness and Nairn, forcing businesses to close to customers for some time.
Postcodes IV1, IV3, IV4, IV5 and IV12, as well as homes in the Tomnacross area and communities surrounding Inverarnie, were all impacted by loss of electricity.
The outage in Nairn was reported at 7.47pm on Sunday and supply was restored to all properties affected shortly after.
Meanwhile, a total of 211 homes in Inverness were left without power for more than 14 hours due to a fault on the overhead network.
SSEN engineers spent the day on site carrying out the necessary repairs and all properties were reconnected to the network at about 4pm.
The power cuts came after an evening of gale force winds, with speeds reaching 50mph.
A spokesman for SSEN Distribution said: “We would like to apologise to our customers whose supplies have been affected by these faults and reassure everyone that our teams did all they can to restore their power as safely and as quickly as possible.”
‘Everyone has been really nice about it’
One of the business impacted by the blackout was The Mustard Seed restaurant in Inverness.
The outage occurred shortly after 10.30am, with staff forced to contact customers to notify them of the disruption, which left half of the venue in darkness.
Andrew Coger, a bartender at the Fraser Street bar, said customers had been very understanding.
He told The P&J this morning: “Half of our restaurant doesn’t have power right now. We have been told that we should get it fully back up and running by about 1.45pm to 2pm.
“We’ve had to call our customers and tell them the unfortunate news but everyone has been really nice about it.”
Conversation