Bartica faces 30-hour outage as generator goes down

Oct 20, 2016 News

– GPL says facing plethora of unfortunate occurrences
The woes of the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) are continuing.
One day after three shutdowns significantly affected both Demerara and Berbice, leaving thousands of customers without power for hours, the problems persisted yesterday.
A fault along the 69kv transmission line linking the Kingston Power Station to the Sophia Substation (Dispatch centre) resulted in a Demerara Berbice Interconnected System shutdown around 14: 45hrs.
Service was restored within 30 minutes of the disruptions, GPL said.
“Our company offers reassurance to the general public that meticulous efforts and resources are being directed towards establishing the origin of this occurrence and we plead for patience,” the state-owned company said in a statement.
The company said that today it will commence effecting repairs on the No.10 generating set at the Bartica Power Station and this is expected to be completed by tomorrow midday.
“These corrective works are necessary to prevent total failure of the generating sets and capacity.
Consequently, available generation will be significantly reduced by a further 800kw as the No. 11 Generator remains offline for major maintenance, thus necessitating an unfortunate outage to the entire township with the exception of customers on First Avenue between 3rd and 9th Streets from 06:00 hrs on October 20 (today) to 13:00 hrs October 21,” GPL said in a statement.
The remaining operational generator which has generating capacity of 500kw will remain in service during this period to dispense power within the power station and customers within proximity of the station for the execution of works.
“We are urging the citizens of Bartica to prepare amply for this regrettable extended period of outage while we work to restore electricity.”
Meanwhile, in Essequibo, GPL said that customers of Fairfield, Essequibo, experienced an extended outage from 14:00 hrs Tuesday until noon yesterday while emergency repairs were ongoing on one of its generators.
GPL said it was forced to implement a six-hour load shedding exercise for customers stretching from Anna Regina to La Union from 06:00 to 12:00 hrs yesterday and subsequently rotated to customers from Lima to Charity from 12:00hrs to 06:00 hrs due to the unavailability of the generator.
“It is envisioned that our Essequibo operations will return to a state of normalcy on or before Friday…” the GPL statement said.
“It is with deep regret that our company has experienced a plethora of unfortunate occurrences in these areas of service delivery. We take this opportunity to reassure customers that we consider our mandate to this nation to be of vast substance and our officers work tirelessly to provide quality service. We remain cognizant of the inconveniences these power disruptions cause and we express sincerest regret.”

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