Updated 20:13 Thursday 11th December 2003
Town Centre In Darkness

Substantial parts of Hertford Town Centre remain without electricity this evening after a fire in a sub-station ten feet beneath Castle Hall.

Worst affected are Maidenhead Street and Parliament Square, where pubs and restaurants have been forced to close on what would otherwise have been a busy Thursday evening. Parts of Fore Street and The Wash are also in darkness.

The outage started early this morning, with many workers and shop staff arriving to find cold and dark premises. Many decided to stay closed, whilst others struggled on in candlelight. Some had backup generators. Waitrose in Bircherley Green were forced to removed all chilled food from display.

Parts of the town had their power restored during the morning, with more at lunchtime, but by 7:30pm many were still without power, whilst teams of engineers toured the town and worked by arclight in Market Place.

Engineers earlier hoped to have power restored to all parts of the town by midnight.

They have also confirmed that a short outage yesterday evening around 8pm might be connected to today's incident.