A family left without power for days due to Storm Malik have criticised Northern Powergrid for their "poor communication" in the wake of high winds that battered the North East.
Hugo McGowan who lives and works in Longwitton, Northumberland, was one of around 80,000 customers who experienced a power cut over the weekend, and he was without electricity from Saturday morning through to Monday afternoon.
It follows disruption in November during Storm Arwen, when one of his buildings had its roof ripped off and his house was without power for nine days.
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The 58-year-old engineer who works from his home workshop explained: "From Saturday, I couldn't get on with work because the workshop can't function without power.
"My wife works next door as a farm secretary, and they were all unable to work too. My children, meanwhile, have become very fed up with coming home to a cold house.
"The Northern PowerGrid haven't put much money into what is an ageing network, so it doesn't take much to knock it, and that really impacts our small community.
"Our neighbours just down the hill who have two young children had to move out after they were left for two days without electricity this weekend.
"And when the farm next door is unable to use their electric pump to get water, they are forced to use the local resevoir, and that means everyone can be out of running water.
"Fortunately our family own a small generator and a wood burner, but lots of people are a lot worse off."
Storm Malik brought windspeeds of over 90 mph, and as of Monday afternoon, 1,800 customers were still without power in the North East.
Hugo's main gripe is the poor communication he's experienced from the electricity distributor during both Storm Malik and Storm Arwen, which lashed parts of the UK with high winds, rain and snow.
He said: "The Northern PowerGrid have good engineers, but they are rubbish at communicating and their website is actually pitiful.
"I first reported that power was down on Saturday, and we made another subsequent report, but it seemed like they hadn't even picked up the first one.
"Telephoning them is an absolute waste of time, because all you get is a generic message about them working on faults in your area.
"Last time it went off during Storm Arwen, were weren't contacted by the company for the whole time, we just got a compensatory cheque afterwards.
"And this time round I haven't had any information or contact from them again - it's really disappointing and leaves me feeling quite cross."
The Northern PowerGrid were contacted by the Chronicle for a comment.
In a statement made earlier today, the distributor's head of customer service Louise Lowes, said: “We feel we have been able to do a better job for our customers by communicating differently in this storm response.
"We recognise that it is frustrating not to be given an exact estimate of when the lights will come back on, but in these circumstances the reality is that we are unable to be as precise as we would be under normal circumstances.
"As we near the end of this event, our focus remains solely on getting the lights back on for the customers who have waited the longest and supporting them as much as we can. Our attention will turn to the compensation process once we have reconnected all customers.”
They also said that two key lessons learned from Storm Arwen include the need to make their website "more resilient to keep power cut logger up during periods of high demand" and to do a better job "providing estimated times of restoration when we still don't know the extent of the damage to our network."
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