NIA CHARLESTOWN NEVIS (January 14, 2020) —  The following is a report from the Nevis Electricity Company Limited (NEVLEC) issued on January 14, 2020, regarding the impact of the high winds affecting Nevis over the past few days and is expected to continue till Wednesday January 15, 2020.

The very high winds continued last night into the morning accompanied by lightning and rain which resulted in many outages on the Gingerland Feeder. There is a permanent fault somewhere between Morning Star and Golden Rock which NEVLEC could not locate because of poor visibility, and the high winds making it difficult to isolate spur lines.

As a result of the weather conditions NEVLEC had to make a decision to abort the fault finding and restoration process at about 2:30 a.m.  At that point power had only been restored to customers from Prospect to Morning Star, which means that customers from Morning Star to Liburd Hill remained without power. NEVLEC will resume the fault finding and restoration process this morning at day break.

There was also an interruption in the supply to customers supplied from the Cotton Ground Feeder at about 12:30 a.m. Power was restored at about 1:15 a.m. and again there seemed to be a permanent fault at Jones Estate and had to left out. The feeder tripped again at 4:50 a.m. and is currently out.

NEVLEC apologizes for the inconvenience caused resulting from this unusual and unexpected weather and will do the best it can to restore power at day break.

UPDATE:

We are making progress. All of the Cotton Ground Feeder is back on including Jones Estate.

We have now restored power to all of the Gingerland Feeder except the Zetlands area where we found a downed power line, and a small part of Chicken Stone where we have a defective transformer. Corrective action is being planned.

There may be some other individual customer issues which we will get around to once we receive the calls.

The high winds are expected to continue until tomorrow so there is some risk to the distribution system and the electricity supply. We are however inspecting the system with a view to attempting to address anything that can impact the supply.

Again we thank our customers for their understanding. This weather is unprecedented at this time which has given our ageing system a beating.