Faulty cable caused blackout

A FAULTY TRANSMISSION cable and an anomaly in the Barbados Light and Power (BL&P) electrical system plunged most of Barbados into darkness early this morning.
BL&P chief marketing officer Stephen Worme said an underground transmission cable tripped out which caused other cables to do the same. However he said the automatic system should have contained the fault.
“An underground cable, part of the transmission lines located between our Spring Garden generation station and the Belmont Road sub-station, tripped out just after 12:15 a.m, causing other transmission systems to also trip. This affected a significant portion of the island, around 90 per cent of our customers.
“This was not a normal situation as our automatic system was supposed to isolate such problems so customers would not even know they had occurred. This did not happen so we are currently investigating,” he said.
As a result, Worme said BL&P workmen had to manually isolate the faulty area and feed customers power through alternative routes. Worme said so far workmen had isolated the faulty area to somewhere between the Spring Garden station and Carlton supermarket and excavation seemed likely.Worme said power was restored to some customers within ten minutes with full restoration occurring by 1:45 a.m.