sent branches crashing into power lines.

Bermuda Electric Light Company said a record demand sparked by the poor weather had caused outages over the last few days.

Belco spokeswoman Robin McPhee said: "As temperatures have dropped demand has increased.

"It's gone from 77 megawatts on Saturday to 94 on Tuesday night, which was a record, but now it's gone up to 95 so it's a new record.'' She said Camp Hill, Warwick, had been hard hit by outages.

She explained: "On Saturday there was a transformer fault at the substation caused by increased demand.

"Last night there was an overload on the main line circuit. The Flatts and Shelly Bay area had the same thing.

"Today we worked to redistribute the power to lesson the load on the circuit and so far it has held out.

"People say why can't we predict this but a change this dramatic we can't predict. We don't know where the overload is going to occur.'' She told The Royal Gazette last night: "There are now a few scattered outages as a result of wind and branches hitting lines.''