Three weeks after the passage of Hurricane Elsa on July 2, Barbados’ power grid has been fully restored.
This is according to operations manager of the Barbados Light & Power, Johann Greaves, who disclosed that after weeks of restoration work, costing around $2.5 million, based on preliminary estimates, 100 per cent power has been restored.
In addition to restoration, Greaves said that efforts are under way to swap out weaker poles with others that are capable of withstanding up to a Category Five hurricane.
Outlining the details of the restoration at a virtual press conference today, Greaves explained that there are still a handful of homes without power, due to the fact that the owners are required to first complete rewiring work before they can be reconnected. He explained that the final phase of the restoration took about three weeks due to a number of circumstances.
“The final part of our restoration took up quite a number of days to complete because these jobs required quite a lot of effort. It required the cleaning up of debris, trees that were blocking access, we had to do pole replacements, restring lines and, in some cases, we may have to do repairs that were specific to a customer. This would have been a very labour intensive and time-consuming process and therefore it took us a while, but the most important thing was that we were able to do it all safely and have customers restored with power,” said Greaves
The BL&P operations manager reported that just over 300 poles and 25 transformers were replaced, adding that company was ramping up efforts to swap out weaker poles with others that are capable of withstanding up to a Category Five hurricane.
(CLM)
