Storms flatten Kent family’s garden and leave them without power for days
A family from Kent are still without power, days after Storm Eunice’s gale-force winds toppled power lines and cut off their supply.
In the village of Oldbury, in Ightham, multiple households have been without electricity since Friday when high winds knocked over seven trees, which pulled down power lines.
The fallen trees are in the garden of David Thomas, 56, who said he, his wife and children heard an “enormous crash” at around 11am on Friday.
He said: “We looked out of the window upstairs and saw the first two trees laying across the electricity cable.”
He said they were the two biggest in the garden, standing at around twice the height of the house.
Five minutes later, another gust took down the other five trees.
“It was a little bit of a shock to see what was a wooded garden flattened,” the retired banker said, adding that his eight-year-old daughter was particularly “upset” because she was attached to the garden and her swings hanging from the trees.
The fallen power lines sparked two small electrical fires, which took firefighters 11 hours to extinguish, in the family’s orchard.
On Monday, energy minister Greg Hands visited the home to see the damage wrought by the storms.
He said some 32,000 homes were still without power and that Storm Franklin had hampered recovery efforts.
Energy crews in high-visibility jackets were working in Mr Thomas’s garden to cut up the uprooted trees and hoist the wires back up to reconnect them to the network. They expected power to be restored by the evening.
Mr Thomas said: “We always knew that, once they arrived, it would take two days.”
He said it was “a little bit frustrating” but “understandable” that the power company had prioritised getting the hundreds of houses in the village up and running before tackling their “isolated problem”.
He was glad the trees had not fallen towards the house.
“The power going out was awful for everybody but it’s better than the house being wrecked,” he said.
The family have stayed warm with a wood burner and cooked eggs and sausages in a pan over the fire.
Mr Thomas said: “A good friend lent us a generator so we could get light when it got dark on Friday night, then about cooking we got the BBQ out. You just get on with it really.
“The first night was quite exciting for the children; it got a little bit less exciting the second day and the third day.”
Mr Thomas said the family grew so tired of the conditions that they stayed in a hotel on Sunday night.