Officials blame employees for recent power outage…two workers sent home

By Ryan Haas
Reporter-SKNVibes.com

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts-INFORMATION reaching this media house indicates that two employees of the Needsmust Power Station have been temporarily relieved of duty after it was believed that they had made “unauthorised” system changes which caused last weekend’s mass power outages.

According to a release from the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, Erasmus Williams, General Manager of the Electricity Department John Channer cited “negligence on the part of staff members responsible for system protection matters at the power station” as a reason for the outages.

Channer’s report on the incident was filed at a special meeting of Cabinet held yesterday (Nov. 17) and Cabinet members referred to the finding as a “very disturbing development”.

“What was very concerning to the team of engineers was that system settings had been changed, adjusting what is called the ‘earth fault setting,’ without the guidance of the supervising engineers. In instances, it was not clear who made the setting changes. These changes in settings precipitated the development of electrical faults which led to the tripping of the generators,” Minister of State for Infromation, Sen. the Hon. Nigel Carty said at the meeting.

SKNVibes spoke to Channer to determine if these incidents were believed to be accidental or intentional by the employees, but was subsequently informed that “our report has been filed with Cabinet and we cannot comment on that at this time”.  ~~Adz:Right~~

It also remains unclear if the two employees would face termination for their actions, which left the whole of St. Kitts without power for many hours on Friday (Nov. 14) and Saturday (Nov. 15). The names of the individuals sent on leave were not released to the media.

A team of Electricity Department engineers has assured Cabinet, however, that measures have been put in place to limit access to control panels without properly signing off first.

Additionally, the engineers assured Cabinet that “all relay settings were checked to ensure that their settings were correct” and security would be increased throughout the grid “take into account the serious nature of the current electrical outages and their inconvenience to consumers”.