Previous Story
Champi downs nine power poles
The passing of Tropical Storm Champi caused nine power poles to come down and main lines to trip across the island, causing an islandwide power blackout, according to Commonwealth Utilities Corp. officials yesterday.
“It caused CUC to shutdown,” acting CUC executive director John Riegel told Saipan Tribune. “Linemen didn’t do any work on that day [Friday].”
Winds remained too high for line crews to address all restoration issues from Typhoon Soudelor and Tropical Storm Champi.
Riegel said they had one crew responding to trouble calls but even on Saturday, crews didn’t work but were just going out answering trouble calls.
“We had a couple of poles that came down. All of the feeders tripped,” Riegel said.
“[Crews] restored power on Saturday. And they continued to restore power to the wells, and people would have noticed that there wasn’t any water for most of the day. That’s because we needed to wait for most of the wells to get back online so we could replenish what’s in the tank. Once we had that up and running, we opened up the tanks and people had water,” he said.
Riegel said most of the 24-hour water service areas were returned to service, while others had to wait until Sunday.
As for the nine poles that went down, Riegel clarified that these were not new poles brought in after Typhoon Soudelor. “They were all on laterals, none of them were on the main feeders.”
On wastewater, Riegel said the Sadog Tasi treatment plant did not have water or power, but the Agingan plant had, with a generator running.
The Sadog Tasi treatment plant didn’t have water, didn’t have power. Agingan has a generator, so it was working fine. The Sadog Tasi plant doesn’t have a generator, so until we had the power back the treatment was less than full secondary,” he said.
On Friday, the last of the Saipan feeders went offline at 2:07pm.
As Champi continues to whirl away from the CNMI, CUC said all its generators remain undamaged and fully operational.
The nine downed poles occurred in the following villages: one poles in Chalan Laulau, two in Kagman, two in Dandan, two in As Lito, one in Susupe, and another in Oleai.
