BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – THE woes of electricity consumers intensified after an island-wide blackout and several unscheduled outages left hundreds in the dark last evening (June 2).
The island has been under load-shedding since May 12 to facilitate generator repairs by the St. Kitts Electricity Department (SKED). The measure was initially meant to last until June 23, but when three more generators went offline last week, the schedule was extended for an indefinite period.
SKED officials warned then that “power could go any time”, but still released a load-shedding schedule on Tuesday (June 1) outlining the affected areas and when their power supply would be cut temporarily.
Despite this schedule, all of St. Kitts lost power yesterday at 7:48 a.m. Though it returned to most areas before midday, disruptions occurred sporadically across the island until late evening.
SKED Operations Engineer C. Jomo Williams said the department suffered a “rigorous” day as a result of the outages, and claimed that its workers had toiled into the night to restore power to affected areas.
He outlined how yesterday’s troubles began, revealing that a fuel leak on one engine had caused the Sandy Point feeder to be taken offline ahead of schedule.
“The day got no better when at about 7:48 a.m. there was a feedback experienced at the power station which caused a blackout to ensue. The problem was later diagnosed to be a fault on one of the cables leading from the Aggreko site.
“The restoration of the station began at 9:05 a.m. with the closure of the SSMC feeder and culminated with the closure of the Frigate Bay feeder at 10:05 a.m. The Cayon and Sandy Point feeders remained off for load-shedding purposes.”
Williams explained that the Bayfords, Canada and Frigate Bay feeders were again shut down at 12:55 p.m. to rectify a problem at the Aggreko site.
However, another outage shortly after 6:30 p.m. in New Road/Monkey Hill, Conaree and parts of Basseterre was caused by damage to a cable at the Robert L. Bradshaw International Airport.
Williams said this problem reduced the station’s capacity by 3.4MW to 18.1MW, far below the 24.5MW demand during the daytime and the 22.5 during the night peak from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
After a nearly five-hour delay, power was restored to these areas by 11:00 p.m.
