9 hours Ago
The Chilly Wizard Ice Cream Company was one of the businesses that ended up being affected by the outage. Business owner David Clarke stated that the outage had caused his freezers to stop working, meaning that his products started to melt. Businesses reported that the outage lasted from as early as 6am to 9:30am on April 23.
David stated that due to having to throw out the ice cream, he ended up losing around £2,100 of product. There were 12 tubs of ice cream on display, with a further 20 in the freezer. As well as having to throw away product, the business had to pause trade and lost out on money it could've taken in the morning.
David expressed his frustration that this occurred, not only to his business, but others in the area. The outage affected a reported four business in the area of Saxon Square, with another being Caffé Nero. The electricity outage meant that store manager Themba was not able to open the store and ended up losing three hours of trade.
Themba stated that originally it wasn't clear that there was an outage as some of store was still able to function. However after finding that the till, coffee machine and some fridges weren't working, it was clear that something had happened and the store could not open. Themba said that they get a 'significant' amount of money during the early morning hours and this was lost due to the outage.
He said: "That's why we open so early." Themba stated that the businesses were unsure as to why an outage occurred, with some speculating that it may have been due to the recent roadworks on the high street. He added that there's also a fear that it may unexpectedly happen again and affect businesses.
Themba added: "We were impacted by it a lot. "I hope we get to the bottom of it." A spokesperson for Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks said: "Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) was alerted to a power cut affecting four customers around Saxon Square, Christchurch at 7:20am on Wednesday, April 23.
"Engineers attended immediately and replaced a blown fuse, which fully restored supplies to all four customers by 9:03am. "SSEN apologises for any inconvenience this has caused while they worked to safely and quickly repair and restore power supplies.".
