St Kitts power workers suspended after outages

St. Kitts and Nevis' Minister of Public Utilities, Dr. the Hon. Earl Asim Martin (Photo by Erasmus Williams)

BASSETERRE, St Kitts, November 19, 2008 – Two St Kitts Electricity Services employees have been suspended after unauthorised system settings led to power outages across the island last weekend. The electricity disruptions had come just hours after Minister of Public Works and Utilities Earl Asim Martin assured consumers that there was adequate supply to meet their needs.

The two workers, one of them a supervisor, were sent on leave on Monday, on the heels of the outages last Friday and Saturday.

In a report to the Cabinet which held a special session that same day, General Manager of the Electricity Department John Channer blamed the outages on negligence on the part of staff members who were responsible for system protection matters.

“What was very concerning to the team of engineers was that system settings had been changed, adjusting what is called the ‘earth fault setting’, without the guidance of the supervising engineers. In instances, it was not clear who made the setting changes. These changes in settings precipitated the development of electrical faults which led to the tripping of the generators,” said Minister of State for Information Nigel Carty, in a Cabinet statement issued after the meeting.

He further disclosed that over the weekend, new procedures were developed to control access to the system’s control panels.

Security will also be increased at outlying sub-stations and the schedule for the upgrade of the power plant protection system has been adjusted to take into account the serious nature of the current electrical outages and their inconvenience to consumers.

During his press conference last week, the Public Utilities Minister, Martin, had assured consumers that the power generation plant had enough available capacity to meet consumer demand.

Officials have maintained that electrical faults were the sole reason for the outages.