AROUND 2,500 homes and businesses across Upton and Lytchett Matravers lost power on Thursday evening, after a fault with underground cables.

Some of the homes, mainly in the Lytchett Matravers area, remained without power until the early hours of this morning.

The power cut follows a similar outage last Friday, although Southern Electric says the two faults are unrelated.

The power company insisted all homes were back on the grid by 11am on Friday.

A Southern Electric spokesman explained: “There is no connection between last night’s interruption and last Friday’s fault.

“The fault last night started around 7.30pm. It affected around 2,000- 2,500 customers. Because of the way the network is set up we could get the majority of them back on relatively quickly.

“But the area affected for the longest was Lytchett Matravers - they were nearest to the fault and actually off until the early hours of the morning. But that was only approximately 100 customers.

“Our priority is always to try and get customers back on as soon as possible.”

Upton’s Coop store closed to customers Thursday night following the power cut. However, it was open for business as usual on Friday.

Southern Electric say the problem occurred on their underground cable network, but they don’t know exactly what caused the malfunction.

“We are obviously very keen to understand what caused it so we can work to try and prevent it happening in the future,” said the spokesman.

“So engineers will now be investigating.”

Southern Electric say all their customers in the area now have power, but if anyone has any queries or concerns they should call the emergency free phone helpline number 08000 727282.