10,000+ customers hit by weekend power outages

| 09/09/2013

(CNS): Over ten thousand homes and businesses were without power for significant periods over the weekend when a major road smash, adverse weather and lightning strikes cause outages from West Bay to East end. CUC crews battled around the clock to get customers connected but some ended up being without power for more than six hours. The trouble started with a car smash in the early morning hours of Saturday, 7 September when a car knocked down a CUC pole along Linford Pierson Highway. The crash took a main transmission line and two distribution circuits out of service affecting customers in South Sound and all areas east through Prospect Bodden Town, East End and North Side as maintenance work prevented the power company from re-routing power.

“Customers experienced service interruption of varying durations from 1:21 am to 5:37 am. The impact due to the loss of the transmission circuit was more severe than normal as the alternate routing of power through the Rum Point submarine cable was not available as maintenance work was being conducted in the Rum Point Substation,” CUC said in a statement released Monday. “CUC personnel responded to restore power to all areas through the submarine cable while the replacement of the pole and equipment at the scene of the accident was carried out.”

The pweor firm added that its Crews worked throughout the early morning hours and into the afternoon on Saturday when repairs were completed at 1:30pm.

Then a major lightning storm on Sunday crossing Grand Cayman took out two distribution circuits at the South Sound substation which serves parts of South Sound, Walkers Road and Crewe Road. Customers in that area were out for approximately one hour before Crews could make the necessary inspection and repairs to restore the power in a safe and efficient manner.
In addition crews also battled with isolated and in some instances much longer outages due to lightning strikes that damaged specific distribution transformer equipment in the districts of West Bay and Bodden Town.

 

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  1. William Wallace says:

    Well we wanted a discount in our bills and we ot it! We will wait to see if the outage caused any savings….

  2. Knot S Smart says:

    Sorry to hear about the crash, but happy to know that CUC is not just shutting off electricity because we were complaining about our high electricity bill, or because we were late paying…