Not a headline you’ll see too often – but we are now hoping that the power cuts that have affected many houses around College Farm, The Stocks, Chapel Row and Horseshoe Lane are now a thing of the past!!
After weeks of slow deduction, during which engineers from SSEN (Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks) have fitted bidoyngs (voltage meters) at Chapel Row electricity box, used considerable trial and error and what often looked like guesswork, they eventually realised that the source of the power supply interruptions was located at College Farm. On Sunday evening they used a digger to find the ‘pot end’ where the mains cable was meant to rest in a sealed unit but this was totally broken and the cable had been shorting often. The contraption in the picture, looking somewhat like a relic from the Second World War, is the corroded ‘pot end’.
Alarmingly when the cable was exposed to the air it started fizzing and popping and then shot out a 3 foot flame, a plume of smoke and a bang like a firework rocket going off – which gave the workmen quite a shock. A lineman was called to isolate the mains fuses (not the ‘Wichita Lineman’ but one closer to home!!). He scaled the pole on the corner of the road where The Stocks meets Chapel Row. Engineers then sealed the main cable with a new pot end.
Joking aside, this has been a long 2-month period of frequent power cuts, disrupted service and considerable annoyance when TVs, timers, freezers and fridges go off for short or long periods. Workmen will be filling the resulting crater and making good over the next few days. In the meantime no one should go beyond the warning barriers still in place on College Farm until all the work is completed.
