Three-hour islandwide outage delays flight

The entire island of Saipan was without power for three hours early yesterday morning after an engine shut down due to a transformer malfunction.

A departing Northwest flight was delayed for two hours because of the outage.

The transformer breaker at the Chalan Kiya/Waterloo substation caused engine 8 at Power Plant 1 to go down, causing a chain reaction that ultimately brought down all of the engines, including the emergency Aggreko generators. The incident occurred at 3:45am; power was restored to the island at 6:31am.

Engine 8 was producing 3 megawatts of power at the time. Because of the way the Aggreko generators are connected to the power plants, that engine’s shutdown brought down the emergency generators, which then brought down the engines at Power Plant 4, said John Ed Onedera, of the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.’s Power Division.

“The funny situation is that when Aggreko came in, they have a relying protection connected, so that if our Power Plant 1 generation goes down, their generation goes down,” he said.

The loss of approximately 17 megawatts of power from the Aggreko generators then brought down Power Plant 4, he added.

“When you lose a lot of power generation, you lose a lot of engines,” he said, adding that the engines are made to automatically shut down when they are overloaded.

Antonio Muña, CUC executive director, said the cause of the transformer breaker opening is still being investigated.

An airplane was unable to push back from a bridge at the airport due to the outage. Passengers on the Northwest flight were forced to sit on the plane for two hours until power was restored to the bridge, and the plane could push back for departure, said Ike Perez, of the Commonwealth Ports Authority.

CPA provided supplemental generators to provide air conditioning for the passengers, he added.

Perez could not give additional information on the flight and said it was up to the airline to keep the passengers on board. A representative from Northwest’s office in Guam did not return phone calls as of press time.

Perez said the airport’s backup generator did not come on because it is still being fixed. The parts needed to fix the generator are being shipped Nov. 18 and should arrive by Dec. 12. After installation and tests, the generator should be working by the first week of January, Perez said.

Meanwhile, the second partial of feeder two went down for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Feeder two includes portions of Lower Base, the Seaport and Beach Road in Garapan south to the San Jose Intersection.