Major powercut blacks out the isles 20/3/14
Hundreds of homes are still without electricity after a major powercut affected the Western Isles and Skye.
The whole of the Western Isles and Skye was plunged into a blackout during high winds and heavy rain in around 3.40am on Thursday.
It followed a similar widespread outage on Wednesday night -
Engineers were still working to restore supplies to Harris and Skye on Thursday morning.
Many pupils on Skye were told to stay at home today as a number of schools shut due to lack of heat and light.
Leverburgh, the main village in South Harris which hosts a old folks care home and a primary school, still without power.
The root cause of the outage is presently unknown.
A statement for power network supplier SSE said: “We apologise for the loss of supply. We currently have a fault affecting the areas listed. Our engineers are working to get the power back on as quickly as they can.”