Another example of the North-South divide then. I can assure you that Northern Powergrid *engineers* tried their very best on the ground but the back office systems supposed to support them were feeding them incorrect information and so wasting their time (at least for my area).
To be fair I think in the face of a widespread power outage you would have similar problems getting through to a human but I would hope that the automatic status messages would be a lot less incompetent than ours were. I got a text message telling me to make alternative arrangements for Saturday night at 0800 on Sunday morning for instance (fat use that is).
Quite a few of the poles round here are visibly bent, rock slightly in the breeze and are marked do not climb. The BT guy who came to do my fibre install wasn't at all impressed to need a cherry picker. All wired services come into the village on the same poles.
I would hazard a guess that one reason why getting some places back on is so slow has been a shortage of cherry pickers that can go on all terrain. The other seems to be one pole snapping and taking its neighbours with it. This can only happen because they were all pretty much rotted through and waiting to snap in the next powerful storm. They should not all fall down like dominoes but in some places that *is* exactly what happened. Wind was from an unusual direction didn't help.
I reckon a bean counter inspired de facto replace only on failure policy (ie. no or minimal preventative maintenance). The inquiry into this will be interesting and in all probability glacially slow and ineffective.
The field engineers here do, but the main organisation doesn't even bother to answer the phone. Their Dalek does it all - unless you are incredibly lucky. I certainly never got through once to a human.