Power cut’s impact still being felt late in the day
A LARGE area of St Peter Port was hit by a power cut in the early hours of yesterday, but even after the power was restored the impact of the fault led to issues for some equipment, including some States of Guernsey systems and a key set of Town traffic lights.
The problem was caused by a high voltage fault in the Rosaire Avenue/Elm Grove area at about 12.25am.
‘Engineers worked on-site in the early hours to restore power as quickly and safely as possible to everyone affected, with the majority back on line by around 4am,’ said head of distribution at Guernsey Electricity, Mike Lloyd.
He said that work continued to investigate the extent of the disruption and apologised for the inconvenience.
Progress updates were posted on the Guernsey Electricity Facebook page.
Some places hit by the outage were slow to recover.
Frossard House was affected, and that led to the States’ website, which was offline for several days last month, going down again.
IT engineers worked all day to restore the impacted systems.
‘Work had been taking place on repairs over the Christmas period and to improve resilience and more extensive work on this is due to continue this month,’ said a States spokesman.
‘The disruption that results from the power cut is extremely unfortunate timing and may mean further setbacks to that work, however it remains a priority so as to reduce the risk of similar disruption in the future.’
While some internal systems were restored during the afternoon and more were expected to come back during the evening, the States admitted that disruption could continue today.
By late afternoon yesterday the main States website was still down, but critical services such as the hospital and health and emergency services were operating as normal.
‘The States of Guernsey apologises to all members of the community for this disruption and fully appreciates how frustrating it will be following the issues experienced last month, and we thank staff who are working extremely hard to deliver services despite the outages.’
Also affected were the traffic lights at the bottom of St Julian’s Avenue, which did not come back on when power was restored.
Traffic & Highway Services said that arrangements were being made for the failed components to be replaced as soon as possible.
Drivers were asked to assist pedestrians to cross the road safely.
