Following the heavy rains and severe lightning of yesterday and last night, the following is an update on the status of the national electricity infrastructure and electricity outages.
St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC) has initiated its emergency response systems and a thorough system status check is currently underway. At this point we are aware that the following major areas are out of power:
From River Doree to Soufriere which has been out from last night. From Micoud Village to Praslin; out from last night. There is an impassable bridge which is hampering our restoration effort in that area. Sections of Vanard, Sarrot, Belair, and Sand-de-Fey.
Union and Choc, from last night, as one of the main substation that distributes power to the north was affected by flood waters from the Union River. Our crews went out last night to manually reconfigure the system to by-pass the substation and restore power to the north, but there are still some pockets in the area that are out and are being attended to.
There are several other smaller areas that are out of power which include: Bisee, parts of Babonneau, Coubaril, parts of Marisule, and other smaller pockets around the island resulting from localised faults.
By our estimate, approximately 15% of our customer base is without power. Apart from the flooding at the Union Substation, most of the problems are associated with broken or leaning poles and blown fuses, and failure of the communication systems in some areas. The power restoration efforts, particularly in the south of the island are being hampered by the challenges with getting vehicular traffic through certain areas that remain impassable at the moment.
LUCELEC currently has several crews working in the field at the moment responding to the no power calls to those areas that we can access, while others are trying to determine how they may best respond in the hard to reach areas.
LUCELEC would like to ask all our Trouble Call Service Contractors and Transmission & Distribution staff who have not checked in to call LUCELEC’s Trouble Call Department, System Control or their respective supervisors.
LUCELEC asks customers who are without power to call its Trouble Call service at 452-2165. The company is asking customers to be patient both in getting through to the Trouble Call desk and with the response time to restoring power as there are many calls coming in.
LUCELEC expects to be able to provide a further update by mid-afternoon.