Five days after the storm, around 2,500 customers in Latvia are still experiencing power outages, electricity distribution system operator Sadales tīkls said.
The most significant power outages are currently in Aizkraukle and Jēkabpils municipalities, where more than 300 customers remained without electricity on Friday morning. According to preliminary estimates, power could be restored to all customers during the course of the day, provided that no additional unforeseen work is required while repairing the damage.
The intensity of repair work has not decreased, but the pace of restoring electricity is gradually slowing because the remaining faults affect increasingly smaller numbers of customers, Sadales tīkls explained.
At the beginning of the storm recovery effort, priority was given to restoring major power lines, where repairing a single fault could restore electricity to hundreds or even thousands of customers at once. Crews are now working on smaller sections of the electricity network, where repairs remain complex and time-consuming, while each individual fault affects fewer customers.
More than 200 Sadales tīkls crews continue to work on repairing the damage,
with assistance from specialists from Estonian distribution system operator Elektrilevi, Latvia’s State Fire and Rescue Service and Latvijas Valsts meži. Since Wednesday, some crews from less severely affected regions, including Kurzeme, have been redeployed to areas that suffered greater damage.
As work on the medium-voltage network is completed, situations may arise in which residents receive a notification that their electricity supply has been restored even though power has not actually returned. This means there may also be a fault in the low-voltage network that delivers electricity directly to the property. In such cases, the company asks customers to submit a new outage report.
There may also be cases in which electricity is restored but another outage occurs shortly afterwards. Such situations are possible because damaged trees or branches may continue to fall onto power lines, causing new faults.
As previously reported, on Saturday, the 22nd of August, and during the following night, Latvia was hit by its strongest summer storm in decades, with wind speeds exceeding 30 metres per second in some areas.
The storm caused extensive damage to both the electricity distribution and transmission networks, initially leaving around 277,000 customers across Latvia without power. In many areas, the electricity network failures were followed by disruptions to telecommunications, petrol stations and, in some locations, shops.
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