COMPENSATION offers have more than tripled to residents who lost appliances in a power surge.

Instead of £300 offered on Thursday, Electricity North West will send £1,000 “goodwill” cheques to 150 customers in the Shear Brow area of Blackburn whose boilers and houshold electrical goods were damaged after the incident on Tuesday morning.

The company has also vowed to triple the number of engineers going door-to-door fixing broken items, after residents grew frustrated at the time repairs were taking.

Initially payments of £300 were offered to affected households.

A spokesman for the company denied that they had misjudged the situation.

He said: “This was an extremely rare occurance and completely unprecedented. We were unable to tell the extent of the problems until engineers were on the ground talking to customers.

“When the scale of the problem was revealed, we drafted more people in. We started off with a specialist team of five people going door-to-door, then increased it to about 13. Now, by calling in other specialists from all over the country, that number will be tripled.

“We won’t be able to give a timescale for everything to be fixed, but we are committed to staying for as long as it takes.

“The increased goodwill offer is to reflect the unprecendented damage and time to make repairs.”

Shear Brow Councillor Suleman Khonat said residents were “pleased” with the increased offer, but worried about the long-term consequences to the neighbourhood.

He said: “When people start to claim for damaged items on their insurance, I think it could be detrimental to the entire ward.

“We have been given no guarantees something like this won’t happen again, and what if insurers say they won’t cover this area in the future or put premiums up?”

A total of 450 homes in the Shear Brow area experienced the surge at 10am on Tuesday, but not all households were affected by appliance problems.

So far engineers have now repaired half of the 70 boilers that were also damaged and have ordered parts for the others.