Northmbrian Water worked through the night on Thursday to restore Darlington's water supply.
It took seven hours to restore the supply after a freak electric fault on a transformer at the Broken Scar Treatment Plant in the town.
The power was back on at around 11pm and water was pumped in from a different part of the distribution system to ensure people's supplies were restored as soon as possible.
Staff then worked through the night to get the treatment plant working again. A spokesman for Northumbrian Water said: "The disruption could have been an awful lot worse if we had not pulled out all the stops and mobilised our people.
"The malfunction of the transformer was a very unusual occurrence, but we will be looking to see if there is anything we can do to avoid such a thing happening again.
"Apologies to our customers, but there was no way we could have anticipated the fault."
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