St. Vincent and the Grenadines experienced another nationwide power outage for a second consecutive Sunday.
CEO of the St. Vincent Electricity Services (VINLEC) Dr. Vaughn Lewis, in a call to WE FM’s Issue At Hand program on Sunday provided an explanation for this week’s outage, detailing how it is linked to last Sunday’s blackout.
“The failure last week, the failure occurred because of a flashover. That’s an insulation failure on our 33 kV switchgear at Lowman’s Bay. It’s something that we haven’t seen or experienced before, but it did create some problems.
Fortunately, our system has a lot of built-in redundancy, so we were able to isolate that side of the switchgear and continue to operate the island, so, we had some repairs to do. We are waiting on the suppliers to fully repair one aspect of the switchgear, but we were able to repair another aspect of the switchgear, and we had a switching procedure this morning to re-energize that aspect of the switchgear, and we had some problems with the switching, so that’s what led to the second outage.” Dr. Lewis said.
Dr. Lewis during time on the program made it clear that this week’s power outage as well as last week’s were in no way connected to the testing of lights at the Arnos Vale stadium.
“Okay, let me clear that up. The first system failure, when the first system failure occurred, the lights were not yet connected to our system. We have not energized that aspect of the work there.
So our first system failure was not related to the lights, and the second system failure was not related to the lights because the lights are not currently on.” He said.
According to an official post from VINLEC, power was restored to all affected areas just after 1pm on Sunday, following the morning’s service interruption. The company thanked customers for their patience and understanding while they worked to resolve the issue.
