Homes were left without electricity for the whole weekend after damage caused by Storm Arwen.

Jim Gardener, 70, who lives in Fence said that he and other households in Newchurch, Roughlee and Spen Brook were without power for more than 60 hours.

The electricity went down on Friday night at about 10.30pm however Mr Gardener did not report the incident until about 10am on Saturday as he had hoped that the power cut would have been resolved overnight.

He said he called later the same day and spoke to a member of staff who told him they could not find the incident and it was logged.

On Sunday morning, Mr Gardener awoke with no electricity and called Electricity North West for a third time, claiming that the member of staff said there was no log of the incident and that they would report it.

By 11pm on Sunday, a frustrated Mr Gardener called for a fourth time and said he was told again that the incident had not been logged and the member of staff  gave him an incident number – something he had not received in his previous three reports.

Mr Gardener said: “I spoke to a man who was the first person to give me an incident number.

“I understand that a lot of people were without electricity because of the storm and we do suffer power cuts here but they usually only last about four hours.

“All the food in our fridge and freezer is now inedible. We had stocked up the freezer right to the top and it is all wasted.

“We have had no central heating but luckily we have had a fire to keep up warm.

“I just can’t believe how long we were without electricity for. Something should have been done sooner – I called several times and it took until Monday afternoon to fix the problem.”

The power for the households was restored at about 1.30pm on Monday – 63 hours after it first went off.

Mr Gardener said that his son, who lives nearby, went on a walk and saw that there were three wires damaged by a tree that had fallen in the storm – with two of the cables having snapped and had fallen on the ground.

He went on to say that due to the damage to the electricity lines, some people were without their landlines so were unable to call the electricity board about the incident.

Electricity North West said that they are not commenting on individual cases after 92,000 properties suffered power cuts over the weekend.

In a statement about the disruption caused by the storm, customer director and incident manager for Electricity North West, Stephanie Trubshaw said: “We understand this is an extremely difficult situation for all of our customers who have been impacted.

“Our customer contact centre has handled more than 50,000 inbound calls and we are still proactively contacting those on our Priority Services Register.

“I assure everybody we are doing everything we can, and our teams are working tirelessly to ensure power is restored.”