Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­ceived the in­de­pen­dent re­port on the is­land-wide pow­er out­age that oc­curred on Feb­ru­ary 16 from the Cab­i­net-ap­point­ed com­mit­tee at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, yes­ter­day.

Chair­man of the com­mit­tee, re­tired Pro­fes­sor of Elec­tri­cal En­gi­neer­ing Chan­drab­han Shar­ma, PhD, pre­sent­ed the re­port to the Prime Min­is­ter, along with the for­mer chair­man of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC), Struc­tur­al En­gi­neer and re­tired UWI Lec­tur­er, Kei­th Sir­ju and Act­ing Su­per­in­ten­dent of Po­lice Al­lis­ter Gue­var­ro.

The in­de­pen­dent team was ap­point­ed to thor­ough­ly in­ves­ti­gate and de­ter­mine the caus­es of, and na­tion­al re­sponse to the is­land­wide elec­tric­i­ty pow­er out­age that oc­curred and to make rec­om­men­da­tions to pre­vent a re­cur­rence of such an event.

More than a mil­lion peo­ple were with­out elec­tric­i­ty from just be­fore 1 pm on Feb­ru­ary 16 to ear­ly Feb­ru­ary 17, as Trinidad was hit by an is­land­wide pow­er out­age.

The sit­u­a­tion con­tin­ued for up to 12 hours in sev­er­al dis­tricts with a domi­no ef­fect on the na­tion’s wa­ter sup­ply, as 107 of WASA’s boost­er sta­tions were af­fect­ed, and po­lice were forced to im­ple­ment an overnight emer­gency plan to en­sure safe­ty on the roads and to pre­vent op­por­tu­ni­ties for crim­i­nals.

To­ba­go was un­af­fect­ed.

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