POWER has been restored to hundreds of Hampshire homes following a lightening strike.

Up to 700 homes and businesses in the Chandlers Ford and Eastleigh area were understood to be without electricity after an outage at about 2.30am.

The power cut is thought to have been caused by an electrical storm, and initially left 1,800 homes without power.

More than half of those had seen their power restored by 7.30am, but engineers were still working for hours to working to restore power to about 700 homes in Chandlers Ford, Flexford and Hiltingbury.

Hiltingbury Infant and Junior Schools was left without power, and the school advised parents to supply packed lunch for their children or collect them at noon.

Southern Electric says the power cut was due to a fault with a transformer at the substation at Baddesley Bridge.

A spokesman said: “All supplies were restored just before 3pm we had engineers working on site in Baddesley Bridge area where there had been some quite significant damage to the electricity network following an electrical storm last night.

We apologise to customers for the inconvenience and thank them for their patience while engineers were working to restore supplies.

The spokesman added that there will be some follow up repairs, he added: “Our priority is always to restore customer supplies and we will be able to plan the follow up repairs so we can avoid power cuts.”