Storm leaves 3,700 Sadales tīkls customers without power

About 3,700 customers of electricity distribution company Sadales tīkls remained without power at 6 p.m. Thursday, the company told LSM.

The largest outages were in Aizkraukle and Jēkabpils municipalities, where about 500 customers were without electricity on Thursday evening.

Sadales tīkls said crews were maintaining a high level of activity, but the pace of restoration was gradually slowing because the remaining faults affected fewer customers. At the start of the storm recovery effort, crews repaired larger power lines, restoring electricity to hundreds or even thousands of customers at a time. They are now working on smaller sections of the network, where repairs remain complicated and time-consuming but may affect only one or two customers.

Crews continued working at the sites, and the number of outages was expected to fall further on Thursday. The damage was greater than initially forecast, so crews would work after dark where possible.

More than 200 Sadales tīkls crews were working to repair the damage, with all available company resources deployed. Seven crews from Estonia’s distribution system operator Elektrilevi had also joined the effort.

Since Wednesday, some crews from less affected regions, including Kurzeme, have been redeployed to areas with more numerous and complicated faults.

Sadales tīkls forecast that electricity would be restored to all customers during Friday. The company was also cooperating with the State Fire and Rescue Service and Latvian State Forests specialists to restore power as quickly as possible.

The company warned that after repairs to the medium-voltage network, a resident might receive a notification that power had been restored even though electricity had not reached the home. This could mean that a fault remained in the low-voltage network, which delivers electricity to individual homes. In such cases, the company asked customers to submit a new report, saying this did not mean the work had been postponed.

Power could also be interrupted again after being restored.