The Gibraltar Electricity Authority (GEA) has said that the power outage this morning, which affected most of Gibraltar, was caused when Ministry of Defence staff damaged a power cable located along Dockyard Road.

The GEA says that the outage was therefore the result of an accident and not because of a lack of generating capacity or of a failure in the distribution network.

A statement continued: “Notwithstanding the scale of the power loss and the complexity in isolating a fault of this nature in order to commence safe restoration of power, the GEA was able to power up some consumers 20 minutes after the fault occurred. By 11:50 all consumers had had their electricity supply reconnected.

“The GEA would like to apologise to its customers for the inconvenience, which was brought about by circumstances beyond its control.”