MIRI: Work on restoring electricity supply to Marudi town is going on after some 4,000 customers suffered power outage around 4pm Thursday.
A snapped conductor or overhead power line had caused the Marudi Junction substation to trip Thursday afternoon when the safety mechanism kicked in.
Sarawak Energy vice president of Distribution Yusri Safri said extensive repair work to fix a fault on a high tension 33kV tower in Marudi is taking longer than estimated due to extreme bad weather and dangerous flood waters.
“We are focusing on getting supply restored and ensuring critical facilities have electricity by providing seven mobile gensets. Our technical team was deployed to the site immediately following the alert on supply interruption yesterday (Thursday),” said Sufri in a statement.
Broken conductors on 33kV high tension tower (circled).
Three gensets arrived around midnight from Miri and four more were deployed yesterday morning.
“The gensets are sufficient to power up 80 per cent of Marudi excluding the rural areas,” he said.
According to Sufri, the tower’s location in the jungle with no road access was made more challenging with flood waters and thunderstorm hampering accessibility and the safe start of repair works.
He disclosed that Sarawak Energy’s technical team was only able to reach the site after two attempts at 4am yesterday as accessibility was hampered by flood waters and extremely muddy conditions.
“Even then, they could not start repair works immediately for safety reasons due to weather conditions,” said Sufri, adding that they finally located the fault at the tower in torrential thunderstorm.
Sufri revealed that preliminary investigation showed that lightning might have damaged the conductors. Repair was still on going as at press time yesterday.
“Another operations team managing the deployment of mobile gensets since midnight is on standby.
“We truly regret the inconvenience caused and assure the people of Marudi that we are accelerating work to restore supply safely,” he added.
Sufri pointed out that regular patrols check the 44km power lines traversing forested areas and private oil palm plantations while vegetation is cleared periodically to minimise supply interruption.