Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE), the network company, has strongly condemned vandals who deliberately set on fire an electricity substation in Derry/Londonderry City.

The fire, which affected around 2,435 homes and businesses in the Anne Street, Circular Road, Brandywell and rural area west of the city, was attended by the Fire Service and the PSNI and caused a network clean up operation costing around £50,000.

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NIE emergency repair teams responded immediately to make the area safe and managed to restore power to 2,419 customers by 22:45. The remaining customers had power restored by 11.00 the next morning.

Stephen Harper, Duty Incident Manager at NIE, said: "We cannot stress strongly enough how dangerous it is to tamper with electricity substations. Substations contain live equipment energised at several thousand volts of electricity. These vandals were lucky to make it out with their lives. As it is they caused considerable inconvenience to the local community and the deliberate damage is likely to run up a repair bill of around £50,000."

(CD/GK)