Storm Doris: About 4,000 will be without power overnight

Met Éireann says worst of the storm has passed as 8,000 remain without electricity

About 4,000 ESB customers will be without power overnight after Storm Doris swept across the country.

While 49,000 homes had their electricity restored over the course of the day, an estimated 8,000 remained without power on Thursday night.

ESB’s head of corporate communications Bernadine Maloney said they were dealing with 900 individual faults across the network.

Those without power are in areas stretching from Castlebar and Sligo across to Drogheda/Dundalk, including parts of counties Roscommon, Leitrim, Longford and Cavan.

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Ms Maloney said the volume of faults and the nature of the terrain meant the process of restoring power was a “hard slog” for the estimated 2,000 technicians working on repairing the faults.

Householders experiencing a power cut were told to see if their fault was already logged on the powercheck.ie website, and if not, to telephone 1850 372 999.

During the orange level weather alert, the gusts reached hurricane force 12 in some areas, with the highest wind of 133km/h recorded at Mace Head in Co Galway, according to Met Éireann.

Commuters faced major disruption on Thursday, with roads and railway lines blocked by trees that had fallen over in Wednesday night’s storm.

At least a dozen flights between Ireland and the UK were cancelled due to the storm, while many early morning departures were delayed due to wind conditions.

Irish Ferry sailings between Dublin and Holyhead were also cancelled.

On Wednesday evening, the Defence Forces LÉ Roisin was involved in a rescue when a fisherman suffering chest pains was rescued from a trawler on rough seas off the Irish coast.

By noon, the worst of Storm Doris had passed over Ireland and conditions across the island started to improve.

Wolverhampton

In the United Kingdom, a woman was killed when a piece of storm debris fell on to her outside Starbucks in Wolverhampton city centre. And a man is recovering in hospital in Cornwall after being trapped by a fallen tree in his car for more than an hour.

The British Met Office declared Storm Doris a “weather bomb”, or an “explosive cyclogenisis”, an intense low pressure system with a central pressure that falls 24 millibars in a 24-hour period.

Storm Doris affected large swathes of the UK, where gusts of almost 153km/h were recorded.

The weather system there has brought down trees, grounded planes, forced the closure of the Port of Liverpool and caused the cancellation of Coronation Street filming.

Insurers meanwhile advised anyone whose home or business might have been damaged by the storm to contact their insurer as soon as possible, to keep any receipts that could form part of a claim and not to rush to throw damaged items away.

Householders were also advised not to put themselves at risk by, for example, climbing their house to check for any roof damage.

For Friday, Met Éireann forecast hazy sunshine across the midlands, north and east, with overnight frost quickly clearing.

But it will become cloudy everywhere by early afternoon, with patchy rain and drizzle developing.

Going into the weekend, the weather is predicted to be very changeable and unsettled, with that pattern expected to continue into next week.

Have you been affected by Storm Doris? If so, please send us your pictures to newsdesk@irishtimes.com.