After the fire was extinguished, Barbados Light & Power engineers were on the job yesterday investigating the problem. (Pictures by Sandy Pitt.)

by DONNA SEALY

FOR THE SECOND time this week, Barbadians, visitors and businesses, mainly those along the South Coast were without electricity.

This time, however, it wasn't the fault of a monkey.

A small fire in one of the gas turbine generators at the Barbados Light and Power's (BL&P) generating plant at Seawell, Christ Church, yesterday around 8:30 a.m. triggered the outage and a total shutdown of the plant.

Chief Marketing Officer of BL& P, Stephen Worme said that within ten minutes power started
to be restored.

By 9 a.m. supply had been returned to most customers and 40 minutes later it was fully restored.

In all, about 75 per cent of the customers in sections of St Michael, St George, Christ Church, and St Philip were affected.

He told the WEEKEND NATION in a telephone interview the fire, though contained within the generator, did cause some damage.

Worme explained that the shutdown at Seawell shifted the load to Spring Garden but the load was too large for that station.

"As a result, automatic protective devices operated, as designed, to shed load temporarily resulting in disruption of supply to a limited number to customers in parts of the northern, western and north-eastern sections of the island," Worme said.

Up at the Seawell plant a team of engineers were busy investigating the cause of the problem.

While BL& P cannot guarantee its customers there would not be another outage, Worme is reassuring them there is adequate capacity to serve the island.

"We have to do a full assessment and we need to do some further work. We will have to pull it down and that will take a couple days," he explained.

On Tuesday, several businesses ground to a halt, schools were forced to close early and in some areas of the country householders had dry taps after an electrical breakdown left the island without power for seven hours.

Investigations into thw outages are ongoing.