On Saturday evening over 2000 homes – including many in Bloxham –  lost their power.  According to Western Power Distribution (WPD) the cause was an underground cable fault.

Those residents who have lived in the village for several years will know that we have not been graced with a resilient power supply  and as part of the Neighbourhood Planning process meetings were arranged with Western Power Distribution  to engage in some proper discussion of the nature of the problem and how it might be resolved.
Since then WPD have done a great deal of work in the village. This has included:

1. Replacing the undergound cable on a number of 1970s and 1980s estates
2. Installing new higher capacity transformers at various substations
3. Installing an additional transformer at the main substation site in Ells Lane at a cost of £1.5M.
4. Building additional resilience into the circuits during processes 1-3 to enable power to be re-routed in the event of faults.
5. Installing insulating shrouding on overhead lines near pylons to stop buzzards shorting out the circuits when their wings touch the cables on taking off – simultaneously frying the birds!

We were not reticent in complaining about the service back in 2014 and so – assuming the speed of reconnection was similar across the village –  we should not be reticent in thanking WPD for the speed with which they managed to re-route the power supply.   We don’t have information about the whole of the village but certainly some areas were back on within minutes – so thanks WPD 🙂

Our understanding is that we are still on a re-routed circuit so we guess this may entail another brief cut when we return to normal.