Residents of hurricane-battered Union Island must wait longer, as Vinlec says there is no set timeline for the complete restoration of the island’s electrical grid.
On Sunday, Vaughn Lewis, Vinlec’s manager, said that the company will have to do a recovery exercise because, with significant damage, they may be able to recover some functional poles, insulators, and hopefully some transformers.
However, Lewis said that while work on Canouan and Mayreau may be a matter of months, there is not that level of confidence when it comes to Union Island.
“I don’t want to promise anything, but I do believe we will be able to make favourable progress on Canouan and Mayreau within a matter of months. However, we won’t have that level of confidence until Union Island is in better condition.
“So we don’t have that level of confidence in a timeline, I should say, for Union Island, until we get a better assessment of the cleanup activity and the supporting facilities that would be put in place to support our teams and regional teams.”.
Lewis said that while Vinlec has a hurricane stock, it does not cover complete rebuilding in the Southern Grenadines.
“We have a hurricane stock of poles and other line equipment, the basic conductors, and so on, but our hurricane stock doesn’t cover the complete rebuilding of the systems in Union Island, Mayreau, and Canouan. So we will have an exercise to recover as much equipment as possible and get a better assessment of what is required to get those islands back online.”
Lewis said the damage to Vinlec’s transmission infrastructure on the mainland amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Grenadines, he said, are a completely different story.
“On mainland Saint Vincent and Bequia, the damage is in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The damage to the Grenadines islands is, I believe, tens of millions of dollars because they’ve really been severely compromised.”
“The Grenadines present a distinct scenario. We haven’t completed our assessments, but based on my preliminary assessment of the damage at Union Island Power Station alone, I estimate it to be at least $6 million worth of damage because it’s not just a conventional power station. There was a solar farm. We had a concrete building with a concrete roof. That was the only building on the compound that didn’t receive damage. Every other building, the supervisors building, and the power station building received damage.”
Given the value of mainland infrastructure, Lewis said it’s tedious to fix all the issues, but financially, it’s not major damage and Vinlec can handle it.
