A widespread, unplanned blackout that cut electricity access to every part of Saint Lucia for nearly two hours on Friday evening traces its root cause to rodent activity damaging a key 11-kilovolt circuit breaker, preliminary findings from local power authorities confirm.
In an official public notice released Saturday, Saint Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC) outlined the timeline of the disruption, noting the fault first emerged at the utility’s Cul-de-Sac power network at roughly 9:37 p.m. Once the damage to the breaker was detected, the company’s pre-programmed automatic protection mechanism triggered immediately. This safety system, engineered to isolate localized faults and stop catastrophic harm to critical grid infrastructure, initiated a full shutdown of the entire island’s power supply to contain the incident.
LUCELEC representatives emphasized that wildlife-related grid disruptions are statistically uncommon, and noted that such risks are standard considerations for power operators across the globe. To address this hazard, the utility has implemented multiple overlapping safety protocols designed to isolate small-scale faults before they can escalate into system-wide outages, though those safeguards failed to prevent Friday’s disruption.
Once the immediate fault was identified, crews launched a full round of inspections and system integrity checks. Power restoration work got underway at 10:31 p.m., with service brought back incrementally to communities across the island. By 11:15 p.m., full power service had been restored to all residential and commercial customers, LUCELEC confirmed.
The utility has issued a formal apology to all Saint Lucian customers for the disruption to daily routines and business operations caused by the unplanned outage. Officials added that a full, in-depth technical review of the incident has already been launched to identify gaps in existing protection systems and prevent similar events in the future.
While island-wide blackouts have been rare in Saint Lucia in recent years, Friday’s incident marks the second such system-wide disruption the country has experienced in 2024, following a similar outage that impacted the entire island on March 6.