Damage to underground cables leaves 5,000 without electricity

KUCHING: Construction work at a major development project near Bormill Estate at Jalan Tun Ahmad Zaidi Adruce here damaged Sarawak Energy’s underground cables, cutting supply to about 5,000 customers in some parts of the city yesterday.

The power interruption which began at 8.07am affected parts of Ong Tiang Swee, Batu Kawa, Third Mile, Pisang Road and Poh Kwong Park as well as Sarawak General Hospital and a private medical centre in the area.

Upon notification of the outage, the technical team of Sesco - Sarawak Energy’s operations and retail arm - was deployed to site to investigate and they discovered the damaged underground cable.

The team isolated the faulty cable and worked to restore supply progressively. They managed to restore 90 per cent of supply by 8.55am with full restoration achieved by 10.55am.

Last week a similar incident took place which saw the interruption of supply to about 5,000 customers in Matang Jaya due to the underground cables being damaged by road construction work.

Sarawak Energy reminds contractors to take precautionary measures before proceeding with excavation work in areas with underground power cables.

The state’s power utility has engaged directly with contractors and distributed advisory pamphlets to them, other than advertising to publicise the matter.

Sesco CEO Lau Kim Swee advised contractors to contact them before proceeding with any excavation work at construction sites.

“Despite our efforts to educate on keeping safe and taking precautions, some contractors continue to ignore this. They fail to realise that they are jeopardising their workers’ safety as well as risk causing power outages which inconvenience customers. In this case, we will bill the contractor responsible for the damage and issue a warning.

“Sesco will continue to build awareness - deploy safety officers to conduct safety briefings and show contractors our cable routes so they can be careful where to dig. We will deploy more cable surveillance teams to patrol and monitor construction sites and identify cable route on site,” he said.

The cooperation of contractors is vital to ensure such incidents do not recur.

In the event of damage to cables, contractors should immediately inform Sarawak Energy’s Customer Care Centre by calling 1-300-88-3111 for the technical team to isolate the damaged portion, and restore supply to minimise supply interruption time.