By L.K. Hewlett
St. Kitts Reporter
No one was prepared for Thursday’s islandwide electrical outage that began in the early morning hours and lasted through to late evening hours.
Basseterre, the country’s economic hub, ground to a near halt as the majority of business establishments had no electricity, no generators and therefore no way to conduct business. Some business were forced to close for the day, some stayed open but said they did so at a loss since a large quantity of their services were rendered useless by the lack of electrical power.
One business owner said it was inconceivable that a whole country could be without electricity for an entire day when there had been no natural disaster.
“You expect this kind of thing after a hurricane, not out of the blue. Only the fortunate ones with generators could do any business today and the rest of us had to lose money. I think the business community should get some kind of compensation because we had no notice and therefore no way to prepare,” the irate entrepreneur said.
A release had been issued by the electricity department on Wednesday alerting the public that there would be an electrical outage on Thursday, spanning the majority of the island. Downtown Basseterre was the only section that would have a steady supply of electricity, the release said.
The Observer spoke with the Minister of Public Works and Utilities late Thursday night, while he was hands on at the Power Station.
“It was outlined in the press release from the electricity department that we were bringing a new 4 megawatt Merlese generator online and there were some specific areas that would have been out of electricity during that process. This morning while they were doing the transfers and moving the different breakers the whole burstbar developed a problem on the relay and therefore the south part of Basseterre which is downtown, was out of power. Throughout this whole process the men at the power station have been working to get everything up and running,” Martin said.
The utilities minister said that the technicians finally figured what the problem was at about 9 p.m. and that the problem was resolved. He mentioned that the various electrical feeders came back onstream one by one until all were functioning once more. The island’s power supply was completely restored before 11 p.m. Thursday night.
Martin apologized for the inconvenience he said he was sure the outage had caused, saying that the problem had been a technical one and something that was ‘unforeseeable’.
“As the minister responsible for utilities, I do apologise to all of our consumers out there.
That specific problem was solved and no one can say whether or not another problem will develop. Only one feeder would have been working today to supply downtown with electricity so that the commercial sector would have power if everything would have gone okay. The other parts of the island would have been without electricity from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m.”
Martin, who had himself spent most of the day at the source of the problem, took the opportunity to commend the staff at the Power Station at Needsmust, most of whom had reported to work at 6 a.m. and worked continuously for the entire day to rectify the problem.
