"WE'RE just the wires business", says Mike Leighton, commercial director of power distribution company NEDL.

This is something of an understatement for a multi-million business which looks after 26,000 miles of overhead and underground electricity cable and employs hundreds of people.

Add to that an operations centre which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and deals with an annual 600,000 calls and you gain some idea of NEDL's magnitude.

Put another way, without them, forget popping to the kitchen for a cup of tea or switching on the television to watch your favourite programme.

Based near Sunderland, NEDL acts as the distribution arm of Northern Electric, transferring power from huge electricity sub stations into homes and businesses.

An electricity network stretching from just south of Berwick in the north to York in the south and across to the Pennines and the East Coast has to be continually monitored by the company.

A control room supervises on-going faults in the network, while calls about interruptions in supply are dealt with by staff manning the phones. Typically, about 8,000 faults are identified each year - from a loss of supply to a single house, to a cut affecting thousands of people.

Where a large scale cut affects the network NEDL pledges to have 90 per cent of customers back on within three hours.

John Barnett, NEDL system operations manager, said: "The majority of our 1.5m customers see no disruptions over many years.

"We are always trying to identify which areas of the network are not working so we can bring in improvements."

Earlier this year the company was stretched to its limit by severe winter storms, particularly in the north of the region.

On Boxing Day three years ago, strong winds also led to more than 1,000 incidents involving interruptions in supply.

Millennium Eve was another 'all hands to the pump' occasion for the company amid fears that computer systems could be affected by the change to the year 2000.

Mr Barnett said: "There was a whole army of us in the building that night ready for any potential contingency and we had gone through a lot of dry runs.

"But thankfully nothing happened and we were able to watch the fireworks out of the window."

Faults which can be picked up by detection devices on the network are logged on a sophisticated computer system called a "trouble management system" in order of priority and colour coded.

Red indicates a fault where there is an immediate danger to the public such as where wires are exposed or an overhead line is down.

A purple colour refers to damages caused by other utilities, blue where a fault has affected one or more customers, and yellow for a single premise fault.

Operations staff at NEDL's base can then direct maintenance teams towards the fault using computerised maps. Vehicles are equipped with GPS - global positioning satellite - equipment which means that they can be tracked and the nearest vehicle to a fault despatched to the scene.

Then it is up to the staff on the ground to swing into action and get the faults fixed as quickly as possible.