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.
