Heavy rains and flooding have left at least 40,000 properties without electricity in and around Lancashire and Cumbria counties in northwestern England.
“We’ve had engineers on boats working with the emergency services to try and access faults in Cumbria,” said Electricity North West Incident Manager, Steve Cox, while teams in Lancaster were working to repair a damaged substation.
Progress was being made quickly and the utility predicted most homes would have power back on sometime before Monday evening after Storm Desmond dumped record levels of rain on northern England and Scotland.
In Cumbria, the most heavily affected county, the local council website says that 33 schools will remain closed Monday and are not expected to reopen at least until Tuesday. The power cuts have also closed at least 10 schools in Lancashire.
Cumbria police said they had sent out divers in response to a report that an elderly male had fallen into the water.
The bad weather had also shut down seven train lines on Sunday, according to the Northern Rail site, with many of those lines not expected to be operable for a number of days.
Members of the armed forces have been deployed to help evacuate people who wish to move.