Tropical Storm Grace left tens of thousands in the dark

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At about 4:30am on Wednesday, 18 Aug., Tropical Storm Grace became more than a minor inconvenience for nearly half of Grand Cayman, as it downed power lines and plunged some 27,000 people into darkness.

As of Friday afternoon, 600 CUC customers were without power.

“We lost quite a few of the circuits due to the wind impact, trees on the line and a few poles down,” said CUC President and CEO Richard Hew in an interview with the Cayman Compass.

CUC’s total grid comprises 25 circuits; only four remained online through the storm. Hew said initial efforts to restore power were hampered after the company’s system became unstable and collapsed, causing the entire grid to shut down.

Despite the systemwide shutdown, Hew said no more than 5% of the total grid was affected.

“If we were to look at… percentages of poles and percentages of miles of… lines, it is very small,” he said. “If you compare this to Hurricane Ivan, where we had… around 25% of damage, this, I would say, is maybe between 1-to-5% of the system.”

CUC’s crews took to the streets, and after working through the Wednesday night – on into mid-morning Thursday – electricity was restored to 21,500 customers.

“It’s been a long haul,” he said. “In terms of our crew both out on the lines and here in the control room, we have to limit them to 16 hours of continuous work for safety reasons.

“We are actually having to, for some of them, plead for them to stand down because they want to continue working, but in our line of work it’s too dangerous to work without rest.”

Designed for storms, not for landscaping

Hew said CUC has invested millions of dollars into trimming trees that encroach on power lines, but those efforts are often thwarted during storm activity due to landscaping designs.

“Most of the impact is where trees are blown into the lines,” said Hew. “The lines are designed to [withstand] the high winds, but not for [a] couple thousand additional pounds of trees dropping on [them].”

He added, “We are constantly trimming trees, but we can’t keep up with it if… trees [are consistently] planted under or near power lines.”

Other utilities

Customers of the Cayman Water Company experienced outages after the utility service decided to preemptively disconnect the water supply for three and a half hours, which affected all the homes and businesses along West Bay Road and into West Bay.

Internet and telephone services were also impacted for hundreds of customers over all the telecommunication providers. As of press time, there were no exact details about which services were affected and the progression of their restoration.