TENS of thousands of homes and businesses in South and West Dorset were hit by a huge power cut this week.

Traffic lights and rail lines failed due to the incident, disrupting the roads and the railways, with some traders forced to close their businesses.

The power outage was caused by a technical fault at National Grid’s electricity substation at Chickerell and the company says it is investigating what happened.

A spokesperson for the National Grid confirmed 50,000 customers were affected in South and West Dorset, causing massive disruption to residents and workers. 

The power cut lasted for over an hour, between 12.25pm and 1.32pm on Monday.

Officers working for Dorset Councils Partnership, which serves West Dorset District Council, North Dorset District Council and Weymouth and Portland Borough council, had to close their South Walks House offices in Dorchester for the day.

The outage affected all systems, including IT, telephones and running water – though the systems were back online by Tuesday.

Dorset County Council was also hit by the power cut, but managed to keep its phone lines running with generators.

Despite earlier reports that traffic lights had failed in Bridport and Lyme Regis, causing disruption on the roads, Dorset County Council confirmed that in fact signals in both towns were left unaffected by the outage.

Simon Gledhill, Dorset County Council network management service manager, said: “Our systems for managing traffic signals across the county were running during the power cut. While the outage was widespread, none of the signals in the Bridport and Lyme Regis area were affected by it.”

Cllr Keith Day believed that some businesses in Bridport were affected by the power cut, but it was “nothing catastrophic, nothing people couldn’t handle.”

He added: “It was generally in the centre of the town.” 

The National Grid confirmed that the cause of the outage was a transmission fault, rather than a distribution fault of SSE electricity board.

A National Grid spokesman said: "We can confirm power was restored at 1.32pm. An investigation has been launched to understand why this happened and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."