Hundreds of homes left without power in Manchester tonight

Hundreds of homes were left without power in Manchester tonight.

420 properties in the Openshaw and Clayton areas were left with the sudden outage at around 9pm tonight, residents told the Manchester Evening News. Electricity North West teams say power has been restored to some properties but over 150 are still affected. The postcodes affected are in the M11 and M43 areas, they have said.

In tweets posted tonight, they have said: "We are aware of a #powercut in #Manchester (M11) affecting 420 customers. Our engineer is on their way to investigate. To receive updates on this please DM your full address & contact number. If you or anybody in your household require assistance, please call us on 105."

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In an update posted just after 9.45pm, they said: "Update on the #powercut in #Manchester. This is also affecting customers in the M43 area. We have remotely restored some customers and engineers are en route to restore the remaining 151 customers. If you require any assistance, please call us on 105."

A statement on the Electricity NorthWest website reads: "This power cut has been caused by an unexpected incident on the high voltage cable that provides electricity to your home or business. We didn't know before your electricity went off that this was going to happen but now we know, rest assured we will get your power back on safely and as quickly as possible.

"Please be aware that all our time scales are estimated based on previous experience and may change if new information becomes available while our engineers are fixing the issue. With high voltage power cut’s, we're often able to get many of the homes involved back on before