THREE houses were left without electricity for 14 hours yesterday after a fault on an underground cable.

The power was initially cut to 13 houses in Roman Road, Blackburn, at 9pm on Wednesday night but was restored to 10 properties within an hour.

A spokesman for United Utilities said: "We sent an engineer out on Wednesday night to see what had happened. He was able to restore ten of the 13 after checking the fuse in the substation.

"There was a fault on the underground cable which only damaged one section which, in this case, linked to three houses.

"Because the other houses were on other phasers their electricity could be reconnected straight away.

"We couldn't get the remaining three back on without digging and finding the fault, which is what we had to do."

The electricity was back on by 11am yesterday.