A HUGE area of Thurrock, including a significant part of Grays and Tilbury, Chadwell St Mary and East Tilbury was hit by a power cut this morning.

There are reports of other outages across wider south Essex. 14 postcode areas have a loss of power and thousands of homes are affected.

It happened just after 5am and the problem has been attributed to an underground cable fault.

A statement from UK Power Networks says: "We became aware of this power cut at 05:19 " and at 5.28am an update added: "We're sorry for any disruption this may have caused. We have engineers on their way. Rest assured once they arrive, they'll work as quickly as is safely possible to get your power back on."

A later statement, issued this afternoon, says: "Engineers worked as quickly as safely possible to restore power to several thousand customers across parts of South Essex this morning. An underground cable fault saw power interrupted at 5.19am with supplies restored in stages and the final two customers back on at 8.02am. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."