Power cables damaged by snowfall

People are urged to check whether trip-switches have been triggered

More than 1,000 homes are without electricity in parts of Somerset after cables and other equipment were damaged by the recent bad weather.

Western Power Distribution says it hopes to have the bulk of its affected customers reconnected by 1800 GMT.

"We dealt with 500 incidents affecting 15,000 people on Friday. [Now] we have about 100 faults which crews are working on," a spokeswoman said.

Engineers have also been drafted in from outside the county to help.

"We have the resources out there and fresh crews in to replace those from Somerset who have worked around the clock for the past few days," the spokeswoman said.

"We have to navigate frozen roads to get to some of the remote locations and sometime when we fix one fault another is discovered.

"We also have people who call us that say they have no power and then it turns out there isn't a fault - it's just that the trip switch has gone off."