Elderly residents of a Dorchester street who lost their landlines and internet when lightning struck a telephone pole have finally been reconnected - 21 days later.

Residents of Fenway Close have been disconnected since August 27, after a telephone pole was struck by lightning when the county was battered by Storm Francis.

Openreach, the telecommunications company responsible for landline and internet service on the street, has been carrying out work to repair the damage over the last week, including ripping up a section of pavement around the pole to insert ducting.

The company had to gain permission from Dorset Council to carry out the work. The area has now been resurfaced and engineers worked until 9pm on Thursday to get residents back up and running.

Resident Martin Burden, 61, said: “We’ve all been getting very frustrated with the situation. It’s incomprehensible that it’s taken so long. It’s bad enough as it is for the street having to self-isolate but without any contact with the outside world it has been very unpleasant for everyone. It has not been a good place to be over the past few weeks. We’ve been getting zero communication from the biggest communication company in the UK.”

According to residents, the average age of the street is around 60 to 70-years-old. Many are disabled or self-isolating and rely on their landlines for outside communication.

Maureen Adams, 82, said: “My husband is at risk so we have to stay inside. My mobile phone doesn’t often work because of the bad signal in the area so we’ve had no connection to the outside world at all. My granddaughter is expecting and we have barely been able to get in touch with her.”

Alan Cousins, 78, said: “It’s been incredibly frustrating. One of my nephews was trying to get hold of me because another of my nephews had gone into hospital, but wasn’t able to tell me.

He added: “The engineers did a very good job in the end and they worked very hard. One of them told me it’s the worst lightning strike he had ever seen.”

The lightning travelled through each individual wire that was going into residents’ homes, burning out the majority of the street’s plug sockets as well as disconnecting the landline connections.

A spokesman for Openreach said: “We understand the frustration, but we’ve just been very busy recently. More people are working from home now which means there is more work for us. We tried our best to get everything fixed for the residents as soon as possible.”