NORTHERN powergrid engineers have worked through the night to restore electricity to the thousands of homes experiencing powercuts due to Storm Eunice.
As predicted, the storm continued its journey through the region last night, bringing expected windspeeds of over 75mph.
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In total, supplies to over 26,000 customers have been affected by power cuts.
A Northern Powergrid spokesman said in the first few hours of Friday evening their teams made good progress in restoring power supplies to around 20,000 homes.
He said that engineers continued working through the night in a bid to restore electricity to as many of the 6,000 customers still without power back on supply before breakfast this morning.
According to Northern Powergrid's live powercut map, there are still some homes without electricity today, including 20 between Darlington and Newton Aycliffe, a handful in the North Pennines, 50 near Hartlepool and 20 near Hawnby in the North York Moors.
The spokesman said late last night: "We expect to see some additional damage during the course of the night and most of the restoration we have been able to achieve so far has been done by reconfiguring the network rather than repairing damage.
"Until we are able to properly assess the damage that has been caused, we will not know whether we will be able to reconnect supplies to all affected customers before Sunday.
"We are going to be able to get quite a lot of that assessment done tonight but we will not be able to complete it until Saturday.
"As the details become clear, we will provide updated estimated restoration times to the relevant customers.
"What is certain is that we will be doing everything we can to reconnect customers as quickly as possible.
"We have directed our resources to the most affected areas. As with Storm Dudley earlier this week, the need to move our teams long distances around the region is less than in other recent storms, which will help us to reconnect our customers more quickly.
"We will be out in force tomorrow to tackle the work that we need to get done.
Andy Bilclough, director of field operations, said: “Everyone can see from the news that there are regions elsewhere in the country that have been hit harder than we have this time.
"But there is still a lot for us to do and I’m really proud of the way the team has put one storm behind us yesterday and turned up again tonight to get stuck into another.
"We’re off to a decent start, and we’ll get whatever we can done tonight and be ready to go again tomorrow.”
The firm is continuing to work closely with local resilience partners to help provide food and refreshments in the worst affected communities.
Because of the inevitable uncertainty that we have to deal with, the initial estimates of restoration time are based on typical averages for storm restoration, so they are subject to a lot of uncertainty.
The company says it will be striving to beat these estimates.
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