Outage for Over 48 hrs

Just a few hours after telling Ate Ellaine that the Electricity Corporation here (AES Sonel) has greatly improved on its services and that outages are no longer as rampant and lengthy as they used to be, one occurred. It was around 5pm on Tuesday and proceeded throughout the whole day on Wednesday, right up to about 6pm on Thursday.

Many at times, the corporation defends itself by claiming that the outages are due to natural factors beyond their control but the latest, which lasted a little more than 48hrs was clearly their fault since it was directly linked to bad equipment. At a road junction just about 15o meters from where my business place is located, there is a transformer that supplies a very large and highly populated part of the city. This transfer is heavily overloaded, causing it to fail from time to time. In order to reduce the load on the large transformer, a smaller one was installed but it seems the power of the smaller one was relatively negligible, so the problem continued. Each time the bigger transformer fails, technicians will climb up and try to make some fixes, which they normally should be aware won’t last for even a month.

The immediate failure of that transformer on Tuedsday evening was the installation of a new electricity line to an area with new constructions in progress. When the transformer failed, part of the town had power while the other part, mine, did not. On Wednesday, the electricians took out power from the other part of the city in an attempt to fix ours but failed since at the end, the other part of the city had full power but the voltage on our end was low, too low that it could not power my PC; just the florescent bulbs. On Thursday (yesterday), another attempt was made again but no one had any hope that the problem will be solved. Well, they tried there best and got things in order.

To everyone’s surprise, they didn’t replace the transformer with a new one as we expected. This is a sign of poor management. Had it been this was not a case of monopoly, Cameroon will have better and more constant electricity power supply.

I wish you blue skies and all things nice,