Fire has gutted a substation of Ghana Grid Company (Gridco) in Tamale Monday night, plunging the entire metropolis into darkness.
The blaze which occurred at about 7pm at the substation near the Choggu roundabout damaged power cables and transformers before firefighters brought it under control.
The fire department could not immediately established the cause of the flames. The Regional spokesman for the department, Opoku Aikins said a team will return to the scene Tuesday, November 21 to continue investigations into what triggered the fire.
However, Northern Regional Communications Director of VRA – NEDCo, Maxwell Kotoka said series of explosives occurred after a faulty feeder failed to respond.
“What it means is that, the fault on the line was not a transient one, it had become a permanent fault so they had to keep it off but moments after that, there was some humming sound from one of the transformers, so they tried to put it off but didn’t work, Mr. Maxwell explained.
He added that the fire escalated in the control room and gutted all the eleven breakers leaving thousands of residents and businesses in the regional capital without power.
“All eleven breakers are burnt and every customer who is served on the eleven KV for now is off. Only major consumers who are on 34 are still on”
Mr. Kotoka could not explain what caused the feeder damage and said the damage on power supply gadgets were “quite extensive” and will take days if not weeks for power to be restored.
“I’ll have loved to be in the position to tell you that we will get light by 6am Tuesday morning, unfortunately that is not possible. The extent is very extensive as I said but between Gridco and NEDCo, we’re collaborating, steps are already in place to get replacement of the eleven burnt down breakers”
“We’re unable to say we will do that by close of day Tuesday or by midday but rest assured we are doing everything it takes to restore power as soon as its practicable”, he assured.
The situation brought out several residents to the accident scene who expressed anger and demanded a quick fix forcing security forces to stand guard and prevented them from getting inside the utility supply infrastructure.
The Tamale Teaching Hospital, Airport and other few regional public installations are currently with power and the effects of the outage would be tremendous in the coming days.
Source: Ghana/StarrFMonline.com/103.5FM/Eliasu Tanko
