Almost 5,000 homes suffered weather-related power cuts in Galway and Wexford yesterday but all had electricity restored by teatime. As Met Éireann forecasts more wet and windy weather today, the ESB remains on alert because of a slight risk of thunder in the coming days.
The weather also caused such damage to a temporary ice rink established at Nimmo's Pier in Galway that the organisers could not reopen "Galway City on Ice" for its fifth and final week.
A storm on New Year's Day blew the roof off the marquee and severely damaged the rink and substructure.
The ESB reported power failure in some 3,000 homes in the Moycullen area of Galway at 2 a.m. yesterday because a wooden pole fell.
However, most households remained unaware of the power cut as supply was restored to all but 500 by breakfast time. A further 300 had electricity by lunchtime and the remaining 100 had power restored by teatime.
It was the third time that Moycullen householders suffered power cuts over the Christmas period. Some households were affected on Christmas Day and again on January 2nd. An ESB spokesman said the fault occurred on a "backbone line" which is the main electricity line with "spur lines" feeding off it.
Each spur line supplies power to five or six homes in the Moycullen/Connemara area.
In the Bridgetown/Killinick area of Co Wexford 1,700 homes were affected following a transformer fault which caused the loss of power to homes just after 7 a.m.
Within an hour power was restored to all but 300 homes which had power restored by lunchtime.
The ESB remains on alert for further outages because of forecasts of winds gusting up to 55 knots an hour and a slight risk of thunder. "Thunder causes us more problems because we can't do anything until it has passed, but it is quicker to fix," the spokesman added.
Today will be very wet and windy but winds will ease later in the day to clearer, showery weather with frost in places overnight.
Tomorrow and Friday will be very windy with south-westerly winds continuing to reach Gale Force. The weather will remain damp and cloudy most of the time, with persistent spells of rain. Saturday will be brighter with sunny spells and scattered showers.