‘Oops, wrong power button!’

A major power outage struck simultaneously across all Saipan villages around Monday midnight, after a Commonwealth Utilities Corp. employee mistakenly shut off a service station at the Lower Base power plant.

The power went off at 11:30pm Monday. CUC managed to restore service to the Commonwealth Health Center and nearby areas by 1am Tuesday.

The utility firm continued to turn power back on one feeder after another, until power was fully restored across the island at about 3:15am Tuesday.

Pamela Mathis, CUC special advisor for corporate communications, explained that the power outage was caused by a series of errors that took place while power division personnel were undertaking regular maintenance on Monday night.

She related that an employee was instructed to turn a generator off, as part of the standard operating procedure when conducting maintenance work.

But instead of turning off a generator, the employee switched off a service station, thereby shutting down two generators.

But doing so, a signal was also sent to a control room in another part of the power plant, alerting the plant operator that the two engines were offline. To prevent the engines from being damaged, the operator turned off all of the feeders providing power to the island villages.

“So you have a human error at one part of power plant that is followed by operator protocol shutdown in another part of the power plant, [resulting] in all of the feeders going down,” Mathis said.

She said the hospital area was first to receive electricity after the outage, while the Kiya 4 areas, including San Jose, Susupe, and Chalan Kanoa got their power back on last.

This comes in the wake of another power outage that occurred Monday morning, which was blamed on a delay in Mobil’s delivery, which caused CUC’s Puerto Rico power plant to run out of fuel.

Yesterday, though, Mobil Oil Mariana Islands Inc. broke its silence regarding this, denying that it was late in its deliveries.

“The power outage was not caused by Mobil’s failure to deliver fuel to CUC,” said Mobil Oil Marianas public affairs manager Cecile Bamba Suda.

She maintained that the oil firm continues to deliver fuel to CUC as part of arrangements made by the utility and Mobil.

These deliveries continued over the weekend until late Saturday evening. However, CUC plant personnel turned away the balance of the product scheduled for delivery on Saturday evening, she said.

“On Saturday evening, the CUC plant personnel refused to receive a fuel delivery from Mobil. Subsequently, CUC plant operators advised Mobil personnel that CUC would request additional deliveries on Monday.

“We then received an urgent request to provide fuel on Sunday; our personnel worked that day to deliver product outside of Mobil’s regular operating hours,” she said.

CUC chair Francisco Q. Guerrero, however, reported that the Puerto Rico power plant did not receive fuel from Mobil until yesterday morning. He said CUC managed on Monday to put the power plant back on by transferring some of the fuel from the Lower Base power plants to the Puerto Rico plant.