PHILIPSBURG--Businesses and households were faced with another bout of power outages on Friday as utilities company GEBE continued with its load-shedding for a second consecutive day.
The company said it had been experiencing “some issues” with its “generation system” at the power plant and indicated that “our engineers and technicians are diligently working on solving the issues with the generators.”
“These issues have caused several areas to be out of power. We will continue with load-shedding. We apologise for this inconvenience,” GEBE media relations officer Paula Gordon said.
Several areas were out of power for periods of an hour and a half, some for longer, while some areas such as Dutch Quarter were out of power more than once on Friday, much to the chagrin of residents and businesses in these areas.
The outages were very difficult for many persons who were forced to endure the extreme heat in their homes and business places without fans or air-conditioning units to cool down.
GEBE Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kenrick Chittick said late last night that the engine was up and running, while GEBE said in a post on its Facebook page late last night that one of its generators have been restarted and the company was gradually adding load to it. “Once all goes well, load-shedding will be discontinued within the next hour.”
The company said also that the area behind the former Cake House in Cay Hill had been without power for some time, which is not associated with load-shedding. Today, Saturday, GEBE will attempt to reconnect the area.
“Drop cords/extension cords connections from existing connections are making it difficult to keep the electrical grid intact, which results in the GEBE grid being damaged because of the overload on the cables,” GEBE said. “We are once again asking that drop cord connections not be done in order for the grid to remain stable.”
Friday was the third day the island was gripped by power outages. The series of outages began on Wednesday. At the time GEBE said this was due to a fault located on a cable that feeds the Dutch Quarter, Oyster Pond and surrounding areas and that due to the heavy wind and rain at the time, locating the exact fault on the cable had been taking longer than expected.
Regarding the outages on Thursday, the company said it had been encountering issues with one of its larger engines at the power plant and load-shedding was in effect.
