Island-wide black-out from cable cut

Barbadians were left without electricity for some time on Wednesday due to a “fault” that occurred near the Barbados Light & Power Company’s (BL&P) Spring Garden generation plant.

The island-wide power outage occurred around 2:15 p.m. and about an hour later some customers’ electricity was restored.

In an update just after 3 p.m. BL&P’s Communications Coordinator Jackie Marshall-Clarke reported that the restoration effort had started and some customers had already regained power supply.

“Our efforts will continue to ensure full restoration in the shortest possible time. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this electricity outage,” she said.

Barbados TODAY understands that work commissioned by another utility company along a section of the Mighty Grynner Highway resulted in damage to a cable which resulted in the power outage.

In one of its updates, the BL&P noted that the power outage “related to a major underground transmission cable struck by a contractor doing excavation work”.

“The fault has been isolated and restoration is in progress. At present, 85 per cent of the island has been restored,” the electric utility company reported around 5 p.m., about an hour before all customers were back online. (MM)