BASSETERRE, St. Kitts-CUSTOMERS of the St. Kitts Electricity Department who are outraged over the extended outages of the past weekend were asked this morning (July 7) by Prime Minister Dr. Hon. Denzil Douglas to demonstrate “a little patience and understanding”.
“Let me use this opportunity to apologise to all of our consumers of electricity for the two days of interruption that we have had,” Douglas said this morning on his weekly “Ask the PM” radio programme.
He went on to explain the circumstances surrounding the outages that had previously been outlined in a statement from the Electricity Department.
“You know that there was a major thunder and lightning storm on the early hours of Sunday morning that knocked out most, if not all of our electricity supply units. As a result of that we had been out of electricity for a number of hours.”
While he did apologise for any inconveniences consumers faced over the weekend, the PM said that the general public must also understand that the events leading up to the outages were beyond the control of the Electricity Department.
“It was an act of God, and I want to thank the engineering and support staffs at the Electricity Department for working tirelessly on Sunday to bring back a state of normalcy to the situation,” Douglas said. “After all, these are not things built by God; these are manmade machines.”
At the same time he was addressing the outages, the PM also allayed concerns that an overseas professional may be brought in to fill the currently vacant general manager’s position at the Electricity Department.
“At the moment we have one of our own local electrical engineers [C. Jomo Williams] who is acting as the General Manager of the Electricity Department. As to whether this is going to become a permanent appointment, I am not able to say at this time.
“However, I can emphasize without a doubt that we will seek to ensure that our local people are first empowered. If we can’t find a local person or no one has come forward, then of course we would want to look into the region before we look extra-regionally,” the Prime Minister stated.
