Sunday’s countrywide electricity blackout had a deep impact on residents and businesses alike. GEBE’s long-lasting outage, own generator issues and a telecommunications shutdown also made it impossible to publish “The Daily Herald” for Monday. The newspaper of today, Tuesday is therefore a combined edition with content of both days.
A fire at the local utilities provider on Sunday morning compounded already existing problems with an acute lack of production capacity that started on May 5. Since then there has been widespread and frequent load-shedding, which is expected to continue for now.
It became clear that temporary capacity must be brought in from elsewhere to meet demand. Thankfully, Curaçao and Aruba have pledged to send additional generators.
However, military transport will be required to get them here, so it may take a while before these arrive, are installed and put into operation. In the meantime, the government-owned company is doing what it can to restore production units currently offline.
Long-term, with three engines past their 30-year lifespan, the need for urgent replacements seems obvious, apart from seriously delving into sustainable energy sources such as solar power, where St. Maarten is regrettably still running far behind the rest of the Dutch Caribbean. There is simply no more time to lose.
Note to our readers
The WEEKender is being republished today because only four of this edition’s intended eight pages were printed by accident in the Friday/Saturday newspaper. We hereby offer you the complete supplement, with apologies.
