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Dr Fredrick Isaac addressing the press conference. |
Charlestown Nevis (May 30, 2005) -- The Nevis Electricity Company (Nevlec) is apologising to its consumers for a power outage that was experienced early Sunday morning, between 2:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
The companys general manager, Dr Fredrick Isaac, said on Monday that the outage was as a result of a vehicle ramming into a utility pole. He was at that time addressing the press at his Pinneys Industrial Estate office, where he also apologised for outages that would have been experienced in the past.
This incident (on Sunday morning) took down the system and it took us a while to restore the power, reported Dr Isaac. We believe that we should have in the circumstances restored the power a lot quicker. For that we apologise to the public.
He assured the general public that Nevlec is currently working on initiatives that would improve its response time and the restoration time so that the power gets back to the public as quickly as possible.
Nevlec, the general manager noted, is also taking the initiatives to improve the reliability of supply to the entire community, which includes stepping up of the tree-trimming programme, since the rains have started and significant growth is being experienced under the lines.
That effort should reduce the number of outages and faults that we have, observed Dr Isaac. We are also stepping up of our preventive maintenance programme to ensure that we do not have un-planned outages.
Where we do have planned outages, we are going to be informing the public in advance of those outages and letting them know the extent of the outages - that is the duration of the outage as well as when we expect power to return, and the areas likely to be affected.
Nevlec, a statutory company but with the Nevis Island Administration as its sole shareholder, is planning for the future. One major initiative includes the aspect of generation where it will be expanding to meet the growth in demand and energy.
However we have done significant improvements in generation and our efforts in the future would be concentrated a lot on transmission and distribution that is the network distributing power to the various communities, said Dr. Isaac.
He revealed that plans are at advanced stage to finalise a loan agreement with the Caribbean Development Bank for the purchase of an additional generation set for the power station at Prospect.
He ended by saying: Once again I wish to apologise to the public in general and we are continuing our efforts and we seek their cooperation, with our tree trimming efforts in the months and years ahead with our efforts of improving the general reliability and availability of power to the public.
