Belco will have a crew on standby tonight for the Collector’s Hill area of Smith’s after two consecutive nights of power outages hit the area.

Tuesday night’s blackout affected about 400 homes, also knocking out the traffic lights at the Collector’s Hill junction from about 7.30pm.

Last night, an unspecified number of houses along South Shore lost power again.

A spokeswoman for the power company apologised to area residents and said Belco would be on watch in the event of another blackout.

“With respect to the outages Tuesday and Wednesday evening that affected the Collector’s Hill South Shore area — there was a fault on the system Tuesday night which appeared to be fully rectified, but when the load on the system increased last evening, there was another outage,” the spokeswoman said.

“Engineers believe they have isolated the problem, but as precaution, there will be crews on standby to monitor the switch this evening to ensure that the problem has been rectified, and if not they will be able to restore power more quickly and investigate further. Belco apologises to all customers affected by the outages, and will be readily on site to deal with any other issue should it occur this evening.”

Tuesday’s power cut was sparked by a palm leaf shorting out two overhead cables. It was followed by a second, less severe cut, probably affecting an underground cable.