CHRISTCHURCH Council was left without power today after an electric cable fault in Bridge Street.

The outage affected several homes and businesses along both sides of Bridge Street, Priory Mews and Ducking Stool Walk, and lasted from 11.08pm yesterday until 12.30pm today.

Scottish and Southern Energy said its engineers were called to a report of an “underground cable fault”, although a spokesman for the council said the cable had been cut during works.

“We have had problems all morning, they went through a cable,” he said.

He said the council had backup electricity systems but since the power cut had lasted throughout the night these had been inadequate.

“This was an unprecedented situation but we will be looking at what we do in future,” he said.

“We need to make sure there is a regular supply before we put the servers back on, so we are going to power them overnight.”

The authority is due to have its servers, email system and phone lines up and running by 10am tomorrow. A planned Audit and Scrutiny Committee meeting tonight has been cancelled.

An SSE spokesman said a water main was also damaged at the location of the repair work, outside the King's Arms Hotel, and this slowed its engineers' efforts to restore power.

“We would like to thank everyone for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience,” she said.

Several residents left without power for lights, heating and freezers were aided by the hotel, which suffered a loss of power to its function suite but was otherwise unaffected.

“Fortunately we had no events booked today,” said reception manager Lauren Bailey, who arranged for residents to receive hot drinks, shelter from the rain and a place to put their frozen food.

One, Louise Poole, contacted the Daily Echo on Facebook to thank the hotel.

“A big thank you to The Kings Hotel who have let local residents use their freezers so as not to lose all our food, plus making us free tea and coffee, and they even let us use one of their rooms so we could get ready for work,” she said.