Substation blaze takes out electricity, phones and IT services in Northampton town centre

Engineers are working to restore electricity and telephone services to parts of central Northampton following a fire on Wednesday night (August 12).

West Northampton Council's offices at One Angel Square are among those premises affected by the outage.

Firefighters from from The Mounts, Mereway and Moulton answered a 999 call at 7.55pm to reports of a fire on Angel Street.

They found a single-storey brick substation outside County Hall alight with large volumes of smoke billowing from the substation.

A Northamptonshire Fire & Rescue spokesman said: "Western Power Distribution attended the incident to isolate the power to the affected substation to enable the crews to extinguish the fire.

"They used four breathing apparatus, two hose reel jets and one main jet and they used the thermal imaging camera to check adjacent buildings for any hotspots."

West Northamptonshire Council says residents may find it difficult to contact some departments based at One Angel Square until the issues are fixed.

A council statement said: "We are currently experiencing disruption to our phone lines and IT systems due to the impact of an electrical fire in Northampton last night.

"You can still contact us on our main number 0300 126 7000 however we may not be able to put you through to some services based at our offices at One Angel Square.

"We apologise for any inconvenience and are working hard to resolve these technical issues as soon as we can. In the meantime you can still access a range of services on our website, email us or message us on our Twitter and Facebook accounts."

A Western Power Distribution spokesman said: "Engineers began work to restore power supplies, reconnecting 638 customers by 8.47pm and a further 212 by 9.09pm.

"An additional 16 customers were reconneted by 5.27am and three more a minute later.

"That left one unoccupied building off supply. Our teams are currently working to restore supplies to this property and to repair damaged equipment inside the substation.

"We will also continue our investigations to determine the cause of the fire."

One Angel Square is the £53million former Northamptonshire County Council HQ which was finished in 2017 before being sold and leased back by cash-strapped authority.

It is now used by West Northamptonshire unitary authority which absorbed the county council and four district and borough councils in May this year.