Officials of the Grand Bahama Power Company (GBPC) confirmed yesterday that the island-wide power outages that occurred last Friday and Saturday were a result of damage to an insulator that was struck by lightning at their plant on Peel Street.
Since then, the area affected by the damage has been isolated from the rest of the plant and GBPC workers are now making plans to rectify the situation.
Community and Custom-er Relations Director Rodger Johnson said initially, they did not know what caused the outages. However, upon further investigation, they discovered that during a lightning storm early Friday morning, one of the towers was hit, resulting in severe damage to an insulator.
He said the impaired insulator brought about a ‘flash over’ which caused a loss in power with the system on Saturday.
“When an insulator is cracked, you will have a problem because eventually it will break because it is made of porcelain,” Mr. Johnson said. “When it is broken, you have what is called a ‘flash over’ which means that the current jumps from one point to ground. So the lightning caused it to ‘flash over’ which resulted in a loss of power and the insulator to be disintegrated.”
Mr. Johnson said some of the insulators and transformers at the plant have been in service for some 40 years, and they will also be conducting an evaluation to make certain they will not have random failures of them from time to time.
“We are sending parts of the insulator off to the manufacturer so that they can do forensic testing and see exactly the impact and force level that caused the damage,” he said.
“These insulators, many times they may have a hair-line or very fine crack and you can’t see it with the naked eye, and when moisture gets into it, then it causes problems like flash overs and burn marks.”
GBPC Transmission and Distribution Director Derrick King said investigation into the matter is still ongoing, but they feel that everything will be rectified in the end.
“We have since then isolated this entire area and we are now making plans to rectify the situation, however, it is going to take some time as we are going to have to isolate much more of the system than we first anticipated in an effort to deal with what has happened,” Mr. King said. “This is something that we are going to put basically all of our resources behind because we don’t want a repeat of what happened on Friday and Saturday.”
Mr. King said even though he could not guarantee that there will be no more outages, the whole focus of the matter is to reduce the number of outages. He added that in the event there are outages, the company’s intention is to reduce the time their customers are without power.
“We can’t guarantee that there will be no outages, we just try to minimise the number and the down-time to our customers,” he said.
Mr. King said the isolation is only on the tower where the damage occurred. He said the system is set up whereby it has the flexibility of isolating a piece of equipment without having a major event.
“We have done that and our engineers and technicians are now doing further inspections to see exactly what we need to do in addition to the replacement of the insulator,” he said. “When you have an isolation at the main (69 switch yard) plant, you would want to effect or do a complete maintenance on the piece of equipment you have isolated. This is our whole intent, so a lot of planning is going into the preparation of just changing that insulator.”
GBPC Operations Manager Ken Saunders estimates that work to the isolated area will take approximately two days, with plans to shut down as early as today once the go ahead is given by the Freeport Container Port because they have to confer with them before they proceed.
By LISA S. KING, Freeport News Reporter
