Black Sunday: Islandwide Power Outage Leaves Guam Residents in the Dark for Hours

October 13, 2003
by Zita Taitano, KUAM News

A power outage left the entire island paralyzed this afternoon at around just before 2PM. What should have been a brief power outage turned out to be an islandwide blackout that left residents in the dark and traffic snarled at major intersections for nearly seven hours.

According to Guam Power Authority General Manager John Benavente, at around 1:30 this afternoon, the MEC Enron Unit #8 began experiencing a mechanical problem that tripped the entire power system. “Coincidently at the same we believe one of the lines up north also failed and what was happening was the fold was sent to the system such that for six minutes...the generators were trying to stabilize themselves and unfortunately after six minutes it did not happen and the whole system went blackout,” he told KUAM News.

Benavente adds that there was a power outage earlier this morning right before 7AM, when a control system at Cabras 2 failed. However, crews were able to fix the problem and power was restored within an hour. He notes that the outage this morning was not related to this afternoon's blackout.

In the meantime, Benavente says that the island should have been fully restored by 10PM. He says the new equipment at GPA's Dispatch Office has been beneficial in maintaining the island's power system compared to before. He said, “It's quite and improvement from the 18-hour outages of blackouts of the past, however I think there's still some areas that we need to work on including how do we get units started earlier, looking at mechanical systems and the like, to improve on it.”

Meanwhile, Benavente says crews are looking into what caused the power line in the north to go down, saying it occurred somewhere between Yigo and Dededo. 50% of the island was restored at around 7PM, with the rest of the island restored three hours later.

Meantime, Guam Waterworks Authority Spokesperson Patrick Lujan tells KUAM News the blackout affected the waterwells, pump stations and treatment facilities throughout the island. He says crews were out checking on the equipment and found no major problems, adding water service continued. He did note that there were some generators at some wells that didn't automatically turn on and had to be done manually.

He says when power is fully restored, crews will be switching the wells back to island power. He says there are areas still affected with little to no water pressure, such as Lower Barrigada Heights, customers living near the Guam Community College and Pagat (Mangilao). Lujan says the situation in those areas is expected to continue tomorrow but should improve in the afternoon.

Today's power outage caused problems for other government services. Generator problems in Dededo and Malesso left some residents without phone service. Guam Telephone Authority spokesperson Sam Hill says the Guam Attorney General's reluctance to signoff on RFPs to fix problems from last December’s Supertyphoon Pongsona caused GTA to not be able to be fully ready for today's outage.

In the meantime, according to a press release from the Governor's Office, Governor Felix Camacho ordered the deployment of power generators to agency substations in Mangilao, Dededo, and Merizo. The Governor also ordered Guam Police Department and Guam International Airport Police personnel to direct traffic through the high traffic areas.

Meanwhile, KUAM News also confirmed with the Guam Power Authority that the lack of electricity affected the Naval Hospital in Agana Heights.

http://www.kuam.com/news/story.asp?headline=7365