Western Power Distribution apologise after hundreds of students miss day of school when cables "blew up"
Additional faults to blame for power company's delay in fixing problem after underground cables "blew up"
Western Power Distribution (WPD) have apologised to staff children and parents affected by a fault which saw hundreds of youngsters miss a day of school last week.
Chulmleigh Community College sent home 565 pupils and 100 members of staff on Thursday, December 7 after high voltage underground cables &apos;blew up&apos; and &apos;took out several other parts of the network&apos;.
Yesterday, Devon Live reported that the school had complained about WPD – which is responsible for the power supply in the South West saying they had been assured at 2am that engineers were on site and power would be restored "no later than 4am".
The first problems were spotted by night shift cleaners around 11.45pm on Wednesday night, when they noticed the power going off and lightning at the back of the sports hall and Primary School.
A school spokesman said: "A few minutes later there was a tremendous bang, and all the power went off."
Power had not returned by 7:45am and as children arrived, the school admitted it was unlikely they would be able to operate normally and a decision was made to send pupils home.
The school says it was "disappointing" that Western Power did not send the right sized generator and blames this for costing the children a day at school.
The spokesman said: "They fixed the problem by 10.40am, but pupils would not have lost a day of their education if the correct equipment had been ordered immediately after the problem started."
Today WPD has apologised. A spokesperson for the company said: “Firstly we apologise to the children, parents and staff who were affected by this fault last Thursday. WPD despatched a team and located the cause of a fault which they started work on in the early hours of the morning. The original fault repair was almost complete when our team located another fault on the high voltage network which we also had to repair.