EXTRA staff had to be drafted in to take calls from thousands of townsfolk who were left without electricity for up to three days last week.

GPU Power had to deal with scores of small faults following severe rain and gales last week.

But The Slough resident Danie Theron said his power was off for three days and he tried to contact the electricity board several times to report a line down at the back of his house.

He said: "Every time I called they just associated it with faults elsewhere and did not take specific details. The calls were not logged and I have made an official complaint."

A GPU spokesman said: "We had thousands of calls and obviously each one would not necessarily be logged.

''The reason we took so long was because there were so many faults affecting so many people and it took time to repair them.

"We drafted in extra call-takers but then there were only 200 and thousands were ringing at once, so sometimes people would have been asked to call back."

The spokesman added: "We have a state-of-the art system but we can't do much about a tree falling on a line."