A power cut resulted in a fault at the sewage treatment plant at Grotto Bay Beach Resort and Spa, causing a stench around the area.

Smoke was also seen emanating from the air-conditioning unit at the nearby Blue Hole gas station.

The outage, caused by a cable that had broken away from the overhead line feeding the circuit, took place at about 7.40pm on Friday and affected Blue Hole Hill and Crystal Cave Road, according to Kerry Judd, Belco’s corporate communications manager.

Seventeen customers were affected, some losing power completely and others experiencing one or two outages.

Electricity has been restored to the sewage treatment plant at the hotel but a smell remains.

JP Martens, the hotel’s general manager, said: “The plant is up and running but it needs to be brought back to life. It is hard to forecast how long that will take.

“We had no electricity coming into the plant so we could not inject any air into it and it caused the plant to go bad on us.

“It was immediately fixed but it takes time to recover. The problem was dealt with quickly, the partial power outage was Friday night, the plant failed on Saturday night and it was fixed by 8am on Sunday.

“We have had no complaints. We have been able to continue our services as normal despite the challenges. We apologise for this but it was beyond our control and we are doing everything to get the plant up as quickly as possible.”

Jermaine Simons, the sales manager for Rubis Energy Bermuda, said there was an internal investigation into the smoke caused by the outage at the gas station.

Mr Simons told The Royal Gazette: “When one leg [of power] goes down you go from three-phase power to single-phase power, which is what your computer, TV and things like that run on, but if you try to run a heavy duty air-conditioning unit on a single phase the motor is going to overwork.

“The motor had strained and created smoke, which set off our alarms. Our fuses and trips did activate when the load got too much. The matter is under internal investigation, so we are reviewing the situation and if there are any lessons we can learn from it, we will implement them as quickly as possible.”

Ms Judd added: “As a safety precaution, any time customers experience partial or split power, Belco always recommends that power be turned off at the fuse box and to call 955.”