Some Gauldry residents are facing Hogmanay in the dark after the street lights went out on a major village road.
Homes and businesses suffered a power cut on Sunday December 18.
A Scottish Power engineer managed to restore some power after the outage, but at least 16 street lights on residential street Maryknowe still remain out of action.
It leaves residents of the north east Fife village fearing a serious accident as conditions turned snowy and icy after Christmas.
Mike Reynolds lives on the street and reported the fault to Fife Council and Scottish Power.
He said without an urgent repair some residents could be caught “coming home from the pub or from other people’s houses” after the bells and risked an accident in the dark.
“Even without the ice and snow covering everything, it has been getting so dark. And the village is full of older people,” he added.
“It is also opening up the chance of opportunistic crime.”
He said he was “totally dissatisfied” to learn the repair work may not begin until January 4.
The problem is understood to be cabling, rather than the lights themselves.
Engineers repaired a wider outage in the village on Sunday, but did not succeed in restoring power to the street lights on Maryknowe.
‘No streetlights’ for New Year
Tay Bridgehead Liberal Democrat councillor Jonny Tepp said street light outages were a common problem across his ward.
He said: “Having contacted Fife Council to report the fault I was told that this was a Scottish Power problem that would require underground cabling to be dug up which would probably not be arranged before New Year.
“That leaves my constituents with no streetlights over Christmas and the New Year which is unacceptable.”
Broken streetlights and icy weather made “a very dangerous combination”, he added.
“The fact that my Tay Bridgehead Ward seems to suffer a major street light outage somewhere nearly every year speaks to the age of the infrastructure, I think.
“Scottish Power need to do more to bring their infrastructure up to date in advance of failures such as this.”
Repair team hoping to start work soon
Scottish Power Energy Networks bosses hope to get a team to the site before Hogmanay to start the initial repair work, although that is dependent on the weather.
SP Energy Networks is the part of Scottish Power that owns and is responsible for maintaining overhead lines and underground cables
A spokeswoman said: “Initial repairs are due to begin this week. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
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