Northern Ireland Electricity has warned contractors to 'dig with caution' or pay the price of repairs to damaged electricity cables.

The stark warning follows an incident in the Rochester Drive area of East Belfast on Wednesday, when 5,000 customers lost electricity supplies after a contractor, working on the water network, hit and damaged a high voltage transmission cable.

NIE Safety and Risk Manager, Roy Coulter has said the repairs could take weeks to complete. “This is another example of contractors flouting safety regulations. Luckily in this incident no-one was injured but the results could have been very different."

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He said NIE has had to warn contractors time and again to use extreme caution when working in the vicinity of underground cables, using safe working practices such as digging trial holes and digging by hand to avoid any damage to or alteration of the location of the cable.

"While NIE will recoup the cost of the repairs from the contractor, this does not address the inconvenience to customers in surrounding areas and the danger the contractors put themselves in.”

Mr Coulter added: “Our engineers and emergency crews have been working hard to assess the extent of the damage and formulate a repair plan which could take many weeks to complete.

"This damage has compromised the security of supply in the area and, while NIE has an emergency plan in place to respond to these types of incidents, the reality is that this damage could easily have been avoided if the contractor had followed correct working practices.”

(VB)