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Islandwide outage experienced Saturday
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Posted on Jan 11 2009
The island was without power for approximately two hours late Saturday morning into the early afternoon
Officials from the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. could not be reached for comment over the weekend on the cause of the outage.
The last islandwide outage occurred on Dec. 22, when an electric pole carrying primary lines in Kagman fell, tripping Power Plant 1, 2, 4 and the Aggreko generators. The outage lasted for about 2.5 hours.
Since the Aggreko generators came on line in September, islandwide outages have been reduced significantly, and when outages do occur they are not from lack of power generation, but instead from power distribution.
Gov. Benigno Fitial has continually listed the failings of the Chalan-Kiya distribution facilities as one of the reasons for CUC’s state of disaster emergency.
“The CUC is facing additional challenges due to the failure of its electric production and distribution facilities,” the emergency declaration states. “In particular, the transformer feeding the Chalan Kiya distribution transformer requires immediate maintenance. Its failure could plunge the south end of Saipan into lengthy blackouts, including the water wells in theAairport area and the Agingan Point sewage treatment facilities.”
