“From the Barbados Light & Power’s perspective, it was like ten years of lightning in just 15 minutes!”
That is how Director of Operations at the Barbados Light & Power Company Ltd. (BL&P) Johann Greaves described the number of lightning strikes that impacted the company’s systems as he gave an update on the analysis done following the recent overnight freak storm that affected the island.
He also reported that the company responded to a whopping 833 per cent increase in phone calls from customers following the weather system.
On Thursday, June 17 several residents woke up to power and water outages following a severe and unusual storm that packed about 40 km of wind speed and dumped in excess of five inches of rain on the island.
It left several houses destroyed, flooded or partially damaged and resulted in downed power lines and blockage to several communities.
During a media briefing on Wednesday, Greaves painted a picture of how the recent freak storm affected the utility firm.
He said “We got impacted very heavily by the lightning storm that occurred in the early morning of June 17. This event we would say is a very unusual event, causing multiple lightning strikes on our network.
“On an annual basis we would normally get maybe two or three direct lightning strikes on our network, but in this case we got many lightning strikes that we’ve been able to identify that hit our network,” he said, pointing out that the company started receiving lightning alerts from weather monitoring systems just after midnight.
“We registered impact on our electrical network just before 1 a.m. when we lost a feed in the south of the island due to a lightning strike at that point. Over the next two hours then more customers were impacted as lightning, fallen trees, poles and flying debris impacted our network,” reported Greaves.
The major transmission line supplying power to the north of the island was also impacted, resulting in customers in the north losing power.
Some 20 per cent or 26,000 BL&P customers were left without power, but by just after 3 a.m. electricity was restored to some customers and by noon only six per cent of customers were still without power.
Greaves said by 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 19, close to 100 per cent of customers’ power was restored. He said the delay in a handful of customers being without electricity for more than 24 hours was due mainly to communities being cut off by fallen trees.
“The final customer [was] restored on Wednesday, June 23,” he said, while indicating that restoration crew members each worked in excess of 150 hours to complete the restoration.
Pointing out that it was the duty of the relevant government ministry and other disaster response teams to clear debris and fallen trees to access some communities, Greaves explained that following a weather system an assessment would first be carried out on the utility’s operations, which would be followed by restoration efforts.
This restoration, he said, would begin with emergency and critical services such as law enforcement and hospitals, followed by essential services such as Barbados Water Authority pumping stations.
“From there we will then be guided by our damage assessments that we do after the storm and we will focus on bringing back the commercial and industrial customers so that the necessities for the island including food distribution are back up so the country can continue to operate,” he explained.
This is then followed by restoration to smaller businesses and residential customers.
Greaves reported that the BL&P received over 10,000 calls from customers over a two day period, following the weather system. This was up from an average of around 600 calls “on an average day”.
After the unusual weather system, the electric utility had to restore 25 poles, and replace four transformers and “numerous” fuses.
The company is in possession of several claims from customers, which Greaves said were being assessed. The total cost of the damage to the company’s infrastructure is yet to be tallied. (MM)
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