Residents and Westin without
electricity since Christmas Eve
~ New cable has to be laid ~
OYSTER POND--It was not a Merry Christmas for about ten households in Oyster Pond and The Westin St. Maarten Dawn Beach Resort and Spa, as there has been no electricity since a main feeder cable shorted out on Christmas Eve.
A generator was installed by utilities company GEBE in Oyster Pond to provide power to the residents while The Westin has been running its generator non-stop. The resort has been instructed by GEBE to continue on generator power until further notice, much to the chagrin of its neighbours.
Although GEBE’s crew has been working around the clock to locate the damaged area, the exact spot has not been isolated up to now, Managing Director William Brooks told The Daily Herald.
Making the task very complicated are the driveways that have paved over the cable trench. Brooks said reaching the damaged section would be quite a costly task because the driveways would have to be dug up and wall removed. To mitigate this, a new trench will be dug as soon as possible and a new cable will be installed to service the area.
The old cable will be put out of service and markers will be placed to indicate the new one’s path to prevent a similar situation in the future. The old cable was placed in Oyster Pond before many of the houses were built and over time its markers were lost.
“We are doing our best. The crew has been working around the clock. Most of the guys spent from the time the outage happened on Christmas Eve to now working to locate the fault and working on solutions,” Brooks said.
As for The Westin, Brooks said the GEBE generator that was installed cannot take that heavy load.
The outage in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve left last minute Christmas shoppers in the dark, especially in stores without a back up power supply. The outage lasted about 20 minutes. The next one occurred on Christmas Day around 1:00pm leaving some Christmas lunches unfinished until the lights were turned back on about 40 minutes later.
