UPDATED: Almost 4,000 homes without power

The head of Weisdale Voe in the snow. Photo: Calum Gray

Thousands of homes have been suffered power cuts as a result of the poor weather.

As of Tuesday morning, SSE said 3,800 homes remain without power.

A further update is to be provided at 11am.

The majority of faults have been caused by “line icing” – a rare occurrence where, at a certain temperature, snow and ice sticks to overhead power lines and accumulates.

This adds significant weight to the lines, causing them to fail.

SSE says line icing has caused multiple points of damage on its overhead line network.

On Monday night, SSE said Voe, Whalsay, Brae, Yell and Unst were the worst affected areas.

The North Mainland is still being affected by the outages as of Tuesday morning.

“We’d like to apologise to all customers impacted and reassure them that we are doing all we can to restore power in challenging conditions,” SSE said.

“Our engineers will continue to reconnect supplies into the evening, remotely rerouting the network wherever possible, but remain hampered by blocked roads, communications issues and ongoing adverse weather.

“We are proactively calling customers on our Priority Service Register and are working with local resilience partners to identify customers who may need additional support.”