Portsmouth 'contingency measures' in place ahead of Norwich as Blues look to avoid Millwall repeat
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The Blues chief said the club have carried out vital work in recent days to increase Fratton Park’s ‘electrical resilience’ for forthcoming match days. This includes the installation of an additional generator to power additional parts of the ground and an agreement being reached for an increased power supply to PO4.
Yet the actions undertaken come amid continued uncertainty as to why the affected independent SSEN high-voltage substation located to the east of the North stand went down just 10 minutes before kick off. Cullen said the outage was caused by a power surge which tripped the circuit breaker. However, the cause of the power surge remains unclear and continues to be the subject of an investigation.
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Hide AdPompey returned to action on Saturday against Bristol City - the Blues’ first home fixture since the Millwall game was called off amid attempts to restore power.
Tuesday night’s visit of Norwich represents Fratton Park’s first midweek game since the November 27 incident. But Cullen reassured fans that additional precautions have been made to help avoid a repeat.
Speaking in his programme notes for Saturday’s visit of the Robins, the Pompey CEO said: ‘We now know the outage was caused by a power surge which, in turn, tripped a circuit breaker in the substation, which serves Fratton Park and neighbouring properties. However, we do not yet know what caused the surge and so it has been necessary to put a series of contingency measures in place to increase our electrical resilience on forthcoming matchdays while those investigations continue.


‘Over the past week, we have installed an additional generator to power parts of the ground and have successfully worked to organise increased supply into the affected substation. I am extremely grateful to PMC, Hampshire Electrical and SSEN for all coming together and working so hard this week to put everything in place for today’s match, as well as for next Tuesday’s fixture with Norwich.’
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Hide AdCullen also reiterated previous apologies for the decision to call the game off 47 minutes after the match was meant to start at 7.45pm. Full power was restored at 8.50pm following the arrival of SSEN fault engineers at 8.40pm.
‘We remain desperately disappointed and upset that we had to postpone the game after the operations team and our electrical contractors had valiantly spent more than 45 minutes attempting to restore full stadium power,’ he said.
‘I must personally express my apologies to all of you that we had to make this decision, which was one ultimately made in the interests of the safety of everyone inside Fratton Park.’
He added: ‘At 8.30pm and with engineers still on their way to the stadium, we were conscious that a match finishing after 10.30pm would mean everyone travelling to London would potentially miss the last train back from Fratton Station.
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Hide Ad‘Safety of both home and away supporters is, and should always be, absolutely paramount, so the difficult decision was made at 8.32pm to postpone the match. Following the arrival of SSEN at their substation at around 8.40pm, they were able to restore full power at 8.50pm.’
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