Kalain Ho­sein

Parts of Cen­tral Trinidad were with­out pow­er on Thurs­day af­ter­noon. Though sup­ply was re­stored with­in an hour, the cause, ac­cord­ing to T&TEC, re­mains un­known.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stood sev­er­al ar­eas across Fe­lic­i­ty, Ch­agua­nas, Cou­va, Chase Vil­lage, Cal­cut­ta #1, #2, and #3, Bal­main and St. Mary’s were with­out pow­er sup­ply. This al­so in­cludes the Cou­va Hos­pi­tal and Mul­ti-train­ing fa­cil­i­ty, which hous­es the na­tion’s most crit­i­cal COVID-19 pa­tients, but back­up gen­er­a­tors would have kicked in.
 
T&TEC emer­gency man­age­ment of­fi­cials in­di­cat­ed that the Cou­va sub­sta­tion went down with the cause un­known. This led to an in­crease in load, which over­loaded some cir­cuits to be tak­en of­fline. Ac­cord­ing to Annabelle Bras­nell, T&TEC’s cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er, “The source has been iso­lat­ed and most cus­tomers should be back on sup­ply.” As of 4:35 PM, Bras­nell said all cus­tomers have been brought back on­line.
 
Though the out­age oc­curred short­ly af­ter Thurs­day af­ter­noon’s earth­quake, which rocked Trinidad with light to mod­er­ate shak­ing, T&TEC of­fi­cials were not able to de­ter­mine if the quake trig­gered the out­age. Bras­nell said, their pri­or­i­ty was restora­tion and they haven’t yet de­ter­mined the cause.
 
On Thurs­day at 3:16 PM, a mag­ni­tude 5.7 earth­quake struck north­west of Trinidad at a depth of 86 kilo­me­ters ac­cord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre, the au­thor­i­ty for seis­mic and vol­canolog­i­cal in­for­ma­tion in the Eng­lish-speak­ing East­ern Caribbean.