Castries, December 27, 2013 – St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC) is pleased to advise that as of 7 p.m. yesterday evening (December 26), power was restored to all customers with the following exceptions:

Hope Estate/Plute (in Grace, Vieux Fort) as a result of access issues to the area; one customer in the Saltibus area who could not be addressed because of a landslide; three customers in Fond Joyeoux (near Grace, Vieux Fort) as a result of a broken pole which will be dealt with first thing this morning; and Venus Road, again due to access issues. A Water & Sewerage Company Ltd. (WASCO) pump house is the only customer there.

LUCELEC will initiate a temporary outage in Choiseul and Soufriere later today, for about two hours, to finalise some of the work done over the last two days.  Once that is completed the power supply will be normalised.

The Union Substation which was affected by flood waters should be back in service by Saturday if today’s tests of the systems there are successful.  LUCELEC’s Transmission & Distribution Manager Gilroy Pultie says crews have been working steadily at the substation since Christmas morning to clean and dry out the equipment. The tests, he adds, are to confirm that is no major failure of equipment as a result of the water ingress, which from all indications does not seem to be the case.

All customers normally supplied off the Union Substation have been getting power off adjacent substations at Reduit, Castries and Cul de Sac since 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve when the system was manually reconfigured after the Union Substation went offline.

LUCELEC wishes to publicly express its appreciation to its employees and contractors who worked through the rain and thunderstorms and in the aftermath to minimise disruptions to the electricity supply and to quickly restore the areas affected.  The company is also thankful for the support of the Ministry of Infrastructure and other agencies that assisted in facilitating access by clearing roadways and creating passage across the Piaye river, in particular.

This is the final update on the status of electricity infrastructure following the heavy rains and severe lighting of December 24, 2013.