BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – THE local electricity supply has come under harsh scrutiny by consumers following back-to-back power outages that paralysed St. Kitts on Wednesday (Apr. 28) and Thursday (Apr. 29).
At 10:20 a.m. Tuesday (Apr. 27), a major cable failure on the Industrial Site feeder caused an island-wide blackout that lasted until late afternoon. Station engineers and technicians quickly began repairs, but attempts to close the faulty feeder resulted in an extension of the outage.
A communiqué from the St. Kitts Electricity Department (SKED) informed that restoration work began at 1:30 p.m. with the closure of the Canada feeder. But by Tuesday evening residents of Ponds Extension, Ponds Pasture, the Industrial Site and the eastern section of Newtown were still without power.
Wednesday’s outage occurred at 2:33 p.m., and like Tuesday’s, affected the entire island. A SKED release identified repair work on the Industrial Site feeder as the origin of the power failure.
“The fault in question was so large that the system protection at the power station was unable to prevent the ensuing blackout, but there was no damage caused to the generators, resulting in a quick restoration time,” it stated.
“Technicians quickly diagnosed the problem in the field as an earthing failure and promptly rectified the problem...the process of restoration began at 2:56 p.m. with the closure of the repaired Industrial Site switch and ended with the closure of the Port Zante feeder at 4:34 p.m.”
SKNVibes spoke to several angry consumers who complained of damaged appliances and spoiled foodstuff, with one woman telling this media house on Wednesday afternoon that she had not had power for the last two days.
Minister of Energy Hon. Asim Martin sought to allay anger over the situation and reassured that the government was still committed to providing a “consistent and reliable” electricity supply.
“Due to an unfortunate circumstance there was a major problem with an underground cable and it affected the station’s power generation capacity.
“I want to apologise to consumers for the inconvenience and assure them the government is still working towards maximum improvement of our electricity services,” said Martin.
The Minister was unable to predict whether there might be further supply interruptions in the near future, highlighting that there would always be problems “out of the station’s control”.
