20,000 still without power

Some customers of energy company Fortum were still without power Friday evening. Most of them, about 8,500 were in south-western Finland.

The early hours of Friday saw thousands of new power cuts, but most of were repaired by the morning.

Over 3,600 clients of power company Vattenfall remained without electricity early Friday evening. Most of these are in Häme and Pirkanmaa.

Eastern power company Savon Voima still has about 150 clients without electricity in different parts of its network.

Suur-Savon Sähkö had progressed in its repairs works, so that its number of powerless households had reduced to a few dozen by midday Friday.

Energy companies are now pulling in extra repair personnel. Fortum is bringing in electricians and lumberjacks from around Finland and from Estonia, while Vattenfall is transferring some of its subcontractors in the north to work on the damage in the south.

Fortum communications problems

Customers of Fortum have found it difficult to get up-to-date information about electricity problems. A map service on the company’s web-pages that shows power malfunctions has been out of use.

Fortum customer services have also had problems dealing with the flood of notices and calls for repairs. On Monday alone, over 600,000 calls were placed to the company's customer service numbers.

The CEO of the company, Tapio Kuula, apologized to customers for both the outage and the delays in restoring services.

In the future, Fortum says, customers will be kept up to date on power distribution problems by text messages. The company has been testing such a system with a small group of customers.

Fortum was not yet able to give an estimate as to when all malfunctions would be fixed. According to the company, this could even take weeks.

At present, Fortum customers may file a malfunction notification on the internet with an electronic form, and the company is giving updates on its repair works in Twitter.