Lightning strikes during Thursday night's thunderstorms knocked out electricity to almost 2,000 homes across the Island.

"There were a number of lightning strikes and we are still responding to some of them," said Belco spokeswoman Linda Smith yesterday afternoon.

The storm also put World On Wireless (WOW) off the air for 20 minutes and yesterday the company offered a one day credit to customers because it feared there could be more problems caused by bad weather over the weekend.

Around 1,700 homes in the Mangrove Bay and Greenfield Lane areas of Somerset, and Parson's Road and Happy Valley Road in Pembroke, were blacked out shortly after 8 p.m. but power was restored within two hours.

Residents in the Melville Estate in Devonshire were reconnected yesterday afternoon and by early evening Belco engineers were still trying to get power to 28 homes in Jubilee Road and Middle Road, Devonshire.

"Almost 2,000 customers were affected by lightning strikes on Thursday and all but 200 had power restored by 9 p.m that night. All but 12 had power restored by midnight," Ms Smith said.

"However, an additional 28 lost power early on Friday in Devonshire and we are still trying to reconnect them."

WOWs president Gavin Wilson said yesterday his engineers will be identifying areas over the next two weeks which might be susceptible to poor reception caused by bad weather and will be installing repeaters there.

"The bad weather, which might last into the weekend, could continue to have an intermittent effect on our service," Mr. Wilson warned.

"For the inconvenience that this might cause our subscribers we will credit all WOW accounts for the equivalent of a 24-hour period."