A HANLEY Swan resident has criticised electricity company Aquila after a Christmas Day power cut nearly sabotaged his celebrations.

Dennis Nightingale-Smith was one of 23 villagers left without power between 3am and 11pm leaving him unable to cook Christmas dinner.

However, when he went next door to his brother's house, he found the power was still on, and was able to borrow his equipment.

"It could have been quite catastrophic," he said. "Had it not been for that, it would have been a pretty miserable Christmas."

He added that it is the third power cut to hit villagers in the past few months, with October storms leaving some without power for three days.

He said before the latest incident another fault had caused a surge of power to go through the system, destroying household goods such as televisions, freezers and lighting.

Aquila spokesman Beverley Harrington said the Christmas day power cut was due to "tree interference".

She added that work was being carried out to make sure similar trouble does not occur in future.

"Aquila spends around £4 million each year cutting trees in the vicinity of our overhead line network," she said. "We have also just taken on 40 extra people to carry out this work.

"We operate, maintain and invest in our electricity network to Government approved standards. We continually monitor the performance of the supply network and the information is used to direct our major capital improvement programme. We invest around £100m on the network each year."