Point of ignition

We woke up to find the electricity was off for us and a few neighbours. The engineers turned up promptly, located a fault in the cable under the road, restored the supply to our house (as we were on the substation side of the fault) and started excavating.

Then it turned nasty. I noticed a faint smell of burning in the house, and went out to check that it came from the excavation. No, they said, and rushed in to see if they could smell it too. After a bit of searching, I discovered that the cellar was full of smoke and, as one engineer said "hellish in there".  An earth cable in the cellar had burnt off all its insulation, and was starting to char the wooden board behind.

It turned out that as they were digging down to the cable they had heard banging under the ground. The electricity was short circuiting along our earth connection, and out via an earthed gas pipe, overheating the earth cable in between.

It took the rest of the day to check all the other wiring in the house,  and replace the damaged cables. They worked very hard to get us back on supply by tea time, with some tidying up to be done the next day. So overall I'm quite grateful to SSE Distribution (the old Scottish Hydro), even though they almost set fire to the house accidentally.

The picture shows the new cables - I wasn't collected enough to take a picture through the smoke.