Businesses and homes in the High Road between Kitchener Road and Beresford Road found themselves without electricity for nine hours on Friday 13 December and for up to another 10 hours on Saturday 14 December at the height of the pre-Christmas shopping season.
Optometrist David Hillel had to cancel a full NHS clinic on the Saturday morning, all of the machines at Heck of a Wash launderette were put out of action and East Finchley Electrical could not raise their shop shutters. Casa Pepe and the North London Hospice were unable to open, while Pacey’s newsagents did their best to trade by candlelight.
Chef Khalid Harichi, not pictured above, had to turn away 25 diners from his Table du Marche restaurant on the Friday evening. “We lost a lot of business,” he said. “Friday evenings and Saturdays are when we make most of our money and we had to cancel a lot of bookings. Our customers were very understanding but it was frustrating.”
Dav Zeinali, who runs Heck of a Wash, lost more than 24 hours of trade and had to disappoint many customers who needed their clothes for the party season. “We are all human and we understand that faults can occur but this is hugely damaging to a small business like ours and it’s hard to get through to someone at the power company to get a response,” he said.
Several of the traders also told The Archer that they held out little hope of receiving compensation from cable owners UK Power Networks as the two outages lasted less than the stipulated minimum of 12 hours each. A UK Power Networks spokesperson told The Archerthat the power cut was caused by a local fault on an underground cable which proved difficult to locate as heat is thought to have resealed the cable before the damage could be found.