Kejan Haynes
Lead Editor - Newsgathering
kejan.haynes@guardian.co.tt
A manicou caused a series of power disruptions that affected customers in the Saddle Road and Santa Cruz areas on Tuesday night, T&TEC general manager Ian Ramrattan has said.
The disruptions occurred between 9.30 pm and 11.30 pm, prompting comments on social media about loud noises, flashes and repeated power dips in San Juan and surrounding areas.
Ramrattan said the first fault temporarily cut electricity to some customers along Saddle Road before an automatic system restored the supply.
Some customers lost electricity for only a few seconds during the first fault, while others experienced voltage dips without losing supply. The second fault caused a longer interruption for customers in the affected area.
He said the fault also caused voltage dips that were felt as far as parts of east Trinidad.
“These automatic systems are designed to operate in that particular way,” Ramrattan said. “Now, when that happened, the fault would have created some dips that would have been witnessed by people even up to areas in east of Trinidad.”
About half an hour later, customers in the Saddle Road area experienced a second fault, which became permanent and resulted in a longer outage while T&TEC crews attended to the problem.
“Certain customers would have lost supply for a short bit, maybe a few seconds before the first auto-reclose took place, and then about half an hour after, they would have lost supply for just under an hour,” he said.
Ramrattan said the second fault was traced to “animal interference”.
“Normally what could happen is that you have this animal that may have caused this fault, which cleared itself, and the animal could have remained in the area, and then the second time around, it would have caused a permanent fault,” he said.
Asked what type of animal was responsible, Ramrattan said: “Manicou, manicou to be specific.”
Ramrattan said animal interference was not unusual on T&TEC’s network, with frogs and snakes also capable of causing faults.
T&TEC has measures, including animal guards, to protect sections of its network, but Ramrattan said breaches can occur depending on the location.
“We have measures in place to prevent those things from happening, certain animal guards, but sometimes there could be breaches,” he said.
