Norman Grindley, Staff Photographer
An employee at the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) join firemen from the Trench Town and Spanish Town stations to put out a fire at the Company's Duhaney substation in Kingston, yesterday. By Trudy Simpson, Staff Reporter
A FIRE at the Jamaica Public Service Company's (JPSCo) Duhaney substation left thousands of customers, mostly in the Corporate Area and sections of Portland, St. Catherine and St. Thomas, without electricity for up to two hours yesterday morning.
The fire began about 8:40 a.m. and affected "probably around a third of the substation. It wasn't a big fire," said JPSCo's corporate communications manager Winsome Callum.
According to the company, preliminary information from its investigations showed that the fire sprung from a short-circuit in its distribution system and had occurred after a tipper truck, part of the ongoing Kingston Harbour dredging operation, got entangled with JPSCo wires on the Portmore Causeway in St. Catherine.
The US$27 million dredging project to expand sections of the shipping lane leading to the Harbour is being spearheaded by the Port Authority of Jamaica.
No one was reported hurt in the fire, which the fire department said led to a surge which destroyed a 69 KV circuit breaker and badly damaged two others.
Ms. Callum says damage estimates have been put at $10 million.
The fire was put out by employees and firemen from the Trench Town and Spanish Town Fire departments with an Ansul dry powdered extinguisher (containing Nitrogen) provided by the JPSCo.
The 50-100lb extinguishers are not kept on fire trucks because they are too heavy.
"With regard to this morning's fire, we couldn't use foam because we have to mix foam with water and the wire was still alive (electricity on)," said District Officer at the Trench Town station, Stewart Beckford.
The fireman said that the fire had spread beyond the breaker toward the ground as it had come into contact with oil.
Miss Callum had explained that the power outages resulted from a separation in the system where the power is broken down and distributed to customers. The fire prevented normal delivery to some customers.
The eastern end of the island was mostly affected, she said.
Power had been restored by 11:00 am as the substation was operating at "80 per cent of its capacity."
JPS also reassured customers that it did not expect further outages as repairs get underway, to the relief of some minds which had thought that this was the start of another round of load shedding.
