HOME Bargains has issued an update after its Oswestry store was closed due to flooding in the basement.

Firefighters were called to the Bailey Street store in the early hours of Monday (September 26) morning.

They found five feet of water in the basement area which had led to the substation exploding and knocking out the power to large swathes of the town centre.

Although power was restored to all properties by the end of the day, the discount store has remained closed due to the extensive damaged caused to its systems.

A spokesperson for Home Bargains said: "While the flood underneath our Oswestry store was outside of our control, we are working closely with Scottish Power to resolve the issue.

“We hope to have more of an update as the situation progresses.”

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Max Smith, an engineer for SP Energy Networks, who was on site throughout Monday's incident, explained that the basement may have been filling up with water for some time before reaching a level which caused the explosion.

The SP Energy team were on the scene all day digging a big hole in New Street to enable repairs.

The power firm has also given an update, explaining where they are with finding the root cause of the flooding.

A spokesperson for SP Energy Networks said: "Due to a cable fault caused by flooding at an Oswestry substation, parts of the town experienced a power cut early on Monday morning.

"Our engineers were immediately deployed to investigate and work to resolve the issue.

"Half of all customers impacted by the outage had their supply restored within thirty minutes and power was restored for all remaining customers by Monday evening.

"Our engineers are working to fully repair the fault and also following up in relation to the root cause of the flooding."

Although most businesses affected on Monday remained closed for the day, some did stay open such as jewellery store RJ Christian, who lit a large candle on their main counter and asked customers to pay with cash as they still have a manual till.

However, many posted notes on their doors explaining why they were closed and reopened on Tuesday morning.