Fire at Ferryhill substation cuts power to around 3,000 Aberdeen homes

What happened

At around 5am on Wednesday 21 October 2026, a fault caused a small fire in the building at Deemount Gardens, Ferryhill, Aberdeen, according to STV News. Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was alerted at 5.06am, mobilised two appliances and extinguished the fire before crews left the scene at 5.56am. A fault in a piece of equipment also triggered safety equipment, which automatically cut power to around 3,000 nearby homes. SSEN engineers attended and restored power to about 1,500 properties within minutes, with the remaining properties restored by 7am.

SSEN said supply was back in around two hours and that engineers would remain on site during the day to carry out repairs. No casualties were reported.

Contributing factors

The source reports a fault in a piece of equipment at the substation that triggered automatic protection. It does not identify the component or the cause of the fault.

Lessons learned

1. Automatic protection that isolates an equipment fault can cut supply to thousands of homes at once, so operators should review how far a single fault can spread across customers.
2. A substation fire can be extinguished within an hour of the fire service being alerted while network repairs continue for much longer, so operators should plan for both the fire response and the repair work.
3. Where power is restored in stages, the time taken to restore each group of customers should be recorded so that the duration of large outages can be understood.

More lessons on spacing, layout and fire spread, fire suppression and firefighting, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

news.stv.tv