By Elesha George
The Antigua Public Utilities Authority (APUA) said it has been able to fix the source of the problems that caused sporadic power outages in several communities situated to the east of St John’s.
Over the past two days, homeowners whose electricity is supplied by the Cassada Gardens number five plant have had in excess of two power interruptions daily.
“The number five feeder has been tripping over the past few days,” Stedroy Roache, System Control Engineer, told Observer.
He said the first instance occurred on Monday morning when a car hit a pole which caused the feeder to trip. That same day, between 9pm and 10pm, there was another outage which technicians suspected was caused by a fault on the line, but when they inspected the line initially, no fault was found.
And again, on Tuesday morning at around 6.30, yet another outage was recorded.
“We then isolated the circuit to do a more in-depth analysis of the line and we observed in the Sugar Factory area there was a burnt arrester that created a fault on the line and that’s why the feeder tripped,” Roache said.
An arrester is a protective apparatus that stops power from flowing beyond a certain point.
The affected areas were Pigotts Village, Paynters, North Sound housing project, Gunthropes East, Gunthropes West, and a section of Fitches Creek.
APUA engineers have since replaced the faulty arrester and are now monitoring the line to ensure that there are no repeated interruptions.
“We have to constantly survey the circuits to make sure there is no interference … we have to constantly monitor and constantly go out there with our infrared cameras to pick up any faulty device on the systems, because that will create a fault or an outage,” Roache explained.
He shared, too, that workers have for the past three to four months been “intensively” engaged in continuous maintenance of the system.
He sympathised with the affected homeowners and described the outages as an “unfortunate situation”.
Roache also recommitted the efforts of the company to provide reliable power to its customers.