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| PM APOLOGIZES
FOR MASSIVE POWER OUTAGE |
| By Sheena
Brooks |
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Following
Sunday’s islandwide power outage, Prime Minister
Hon. Denzil Douglas made a public apology to the federation
for the inconvenience of being without electricity for
several hours.
“A major thunder and lightning storm in the early
hours on Sunday knocked out most if not all of our electricity
supply units and as result of that we were out of electricity
for a number of prolonged hours. I personally want to
apologies to the public for this. It was an act of God,”
he said on Tuesday.
He thanked the staff at the Needsmust Power Station
who he said had worked tirelessly on Sunday to normalize
the situation. According to a release issued by officials
at the power station, some areas of the island were
affected since the earlier hours of Sunday while Basseterre
and other areas experienced outage later on that day.
“Residents of Bayfords, Canada, Cayon and Sandy
Point feeders were affected in the early morning hours
of Sunday. This was followed by a lighting strike shortly
after 12 noon that caused the system to become unstable
resulting in the automatic protection for the Aggreko
containers activating, causing them to shut down. This
caused a cascading effect resulting in the loss of electricity
islandwide,” Operations Engineer C. Jomo Williams
said.
He said that engineers and technicians carried out all
the necessary checks on generators and equipment and
field technicians carried out the necessary checks and
reconfiguration of feeders before the system of reconfiguration
began. The interruption in electricity service ended
at approximately 6:30 p.m. Members of opposition party
PAM are challenging the explanation offered, claiming
that the leased generators are prototypes and riddled
with technical problems not likely to be repairable. |
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