BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – AN official from the St. Kitts Electrical Company (SKELEC) stated employees are currently engaged in maintenance and preventative works to feeders around the island as the company prepares for this year’s hurricane season.
In a recent interview with SKNVibes, SKELEC’s Public Relations Officer Gawain Fraites explained that the company is currently carrying out its routine maintenance work and also putting preventative measures in place in the event of hurricanes.
“We continue to have maintenance work. We were working on Gillard’s last week and we continue to do maintenance and a lot of preventative works, so as not to have a recurrence of situations this (power outage due to faults with the feeders).”
He declared that under preventative measures, the company would be carrying out its usual tree-cutting exercise in order to minimise tree-related obstacles that cause power disruptions during the hurricane period.
“So, we continue to do a lot of preventative works on our systems, so that is what you would see going forward. Especially now that the hurricane season will begin in two or three months, you would see a release about our tree-cutting exercise, because what we realize is that if we cut the trees and trim them we would have less outages and things like that.
“So you would be seeing more maintenance work done in certain areas, but that is something that we would continue doing. We do maintenance work like three, four times a week just to make sure our systems work as they should and make sure that the equipment work as they should. And also make sure that the consumers are getting the power that they should be receiving,” Fraites explained.
He called on individuals to report broken street lamps or lamps which illuminate during the day, noting that this is one of the ways that the company is seeking to reduce energy wastage.
The utility service provider is currently sensitising the public about energy wastage and ways to reduce it in their homes.
“If there is a post in the area and it has lights on all the time, they can take down the pole number and let us know. If the light is on or if it doesn’t come on, they can take down the number or they can go to skelec.kn and, under faults, they can put in the number. It is three simple questions they would have to answer; the pole number, if the light is on, and if it is on all the time. And they can submit that information and we will have a crew go out and fix it,” Fraites further explained.
He noted that all that is needed is the number of the pole as all poles are “geo-tagged” for quick response to any related issue.
