TWO elderly residents' homes in Stacksteads were connected to a street light in order to restore electricity after a power cut.

The power failure affected eight homes on Crow Tree Avenue and School Street and it was 14 hours before electricity was restored to some of the houses. Even then the lights remained dim for hours because of a second fault.

The homes of two elderly residents had to be connected to a street light while engineers worked to trace a fault in a second cable.

Mother-of-three Tracey Riley said her family had a sleepless night because her children would not go to bed as there was no power for their nightlights.

She said: "There was a generator going all night to power spotlights in the garden next-door to my house. So there was plenty of light outside -- but none inside.

"When the lights came back on at 3.30am they were all dim and the kitchen fluorescent lights would not work so I had to make the children's lunches by candlelight and I set fire to my son's lunchbox. The kettle took ages to boil and the shower was cold."

Tracey and husband Anthony ended up with their daughter Georgia, four, sleeping in their bed and she said they stumbled through breakfast with no lights in the kitchen just candles.

Her children Georgia, Bradley, eight, and Macauley, six, managed to get to Waterfoot Primary School yesterday and by 4pm engineers restored the family's supply.

But Anthony said: "Two elderly neighbours had no power at all and the engineers temporarily connected them to the street light until they could find the fault."

A spokesman for United Utilities said the first fault from 1.30pm on Wednesday was in a low voltage cable and that was repaired in the early hours of Thursday but because it was night the engineers could not knock on people's door or ring them up to check the power was back.

He said: "At 11am we got a call to say two homes had no power and so we connected them to a street light temporarily while we traced the second fault.

"This kind of temporary connection to a street light would provide the same kind of voltage that would be supplied to the house."