Lightning strike kills power for hour

An afternoon thunderstorm’s lightning triggered a power cut in several parishes, the Barbados Light & Power Company (BL&P) said.

But power was quickly restored by an electric company crew, the utility said.

BL&P spokeswoman Jackie Marshall-Clarke confirmed the development this evening, adding that customers in the north of the island, parts of St George and St Michael were without power for just under an hour “because of a lighting strike during the inclement weather”.

She said reports were received about sparks from a pole outside the company’s St Thomas sub station.

“It is believed that lightning struck a switch on the 24 kV transmission line between Spring Garden Substation and the St Thomas Substation, causing a fault which resulted in the outage to customers,” Marshall-Clarke said.

Just after midday, the island central and northwestern areas were drenched with heavy rainfall, causing flash flooding in some districts.

This comes a day after the Met Office issued a high surf and small craft advisory, outlining that “a broad area of low pressure centered over the north Atlantic had been generating large northerly to north northeasterly sea-swells, which have been propagating south-westwards across the eastern Caribbean”.

These conditions, it had said, were expected to persist into the weekend, with sea swells of at least 2 to 3 metres (or seven to ten feet).