While the storm, which hit Wednesday lunch-time, was fairly short-lived – an RAF Red Arrows display planned for the afternoon was still able to go ahead – high winds and rain brought down branches and trees, which in turn cut power lines and even knocked down electricity poles.

One team working on restoring connections had around 30 such incidents to check out, and still had not finished that task as of Saturday.

Nikolai Žulin, senior electrician at Leonhard Weiss, a construction firm contracted to carry out the work, told AK that: "The posts are rotten get broken. If one tree falls, that can knock out three or four posts and the cables go the same way."

Restoration work can also necessitate turning off the electricity in an area, leading to further disruptions.

Nõmme, a heavily-forested residential area, saw several outages, and power was switched off early Saturday morning, but in one case, on Trummi street, the work – involving three knocked-out poles – continued all day.

Staff are working from 9 a.m. to around 2 a.m. the next day to get the job done, while employees not scheduled to work have been drafted in as well.

In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday's storm, 33 outages were reported in Harju County alone, leaving around 10,000 customers without power.

Grid distributor Elektrilevi operates an outages map of the whole country, updated in real time. While it was showing 10 outages in Harju County as of the time of writing, close to 100 were present in the much more sparsely-populated southeast of the country.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!