NEWSDAY STAFF

ALL OF Trinidad was without power for more than six hours on Wednesday afternoon.

The sudden loss of power caught the entire island unawares and led to businesses closing early, schools ending early and rumours throughout Trinidad as to the real reason behind the outage. Tobago was however unaffected.

Addressing the issue on CNC3's 7 pm newscast, TTEC’s general manager Kelvin Ramsook said a fault developed in one of the major circuits which triggered their independent stations to shut down, causing the islandwide blackout.

“Today at 12.52 pm a fault developed on our system one of our major circuits called the Union Gandhi 220 KV circuit.

"As a result of a fault developing our computerised system was able to detect the location and we dispatched our personnel on the site to determine what the cause was,” Ramsook said.

He added that the matter was still being investigated and a report will be completed and submitted to Public Utilities Minister Marvin Gonzales.

Ramsook estimated that full power would have been restored by at least midnight. He said the fault identified forced the generators at Trinidad Generation Unlimited (TGU) to shut down.

Ramsook said while the system was cleared at about 1.30 pm, the issue that was still outstanding then was getting the generation capacity back on to the grid.

“We are now in what you call an island mode and in that we have never had this situation occurring for many years.

"And what we have is all four generating stations, separated and that we are having challenges in getting the capacity back onto the grid and the interconnection thereafter” he said identifying the outage as a travesty.

“Whatever is necessary to avoid a repeat of this situation, I know the minister has made it abundantly clear to me, the commission has to put the systems in place. This is unacceptable and therefore we will have to do what is necessary to ensure there is no repeat of the situation.”

Gonzales who was with Ramsook, apologised to the nation for the inconvenience. He said there must be a thorough report on the matter and steps must be taken to ensure there is no re-occurrence.

“What transpired today exposed certain vulnerabilities on the electrical grid. And I will be speaking with the Prime Minister and my colleagues in the cabinet so that we can undertake, working with T&TEC, a very comprehensive investigation and review of the electrical grid to ensure that we put the mitigating measures in place as quickly as possible to prevent re occurrence of this within the short to medium term.

"We will get another independent investigation to give us a report on what transpired on what are some of the other things we can put in place to ensure that we don't get back in this situation anytime soon.”

WIDESPREAD IMPACT

As a result of the nationwide blackout, commuters had to endure standstill traffic while citizens experienced low water pressure to dry taps in some cases along with glitching mobile data.

At about 1 pm, several areas throughout the country