Pole fire cuts power to customers in George Town

| 05/05/2016 | 23 Comments
Cayman News Service

CUC crew at work

(CNS): A number of customers in and around the capital were without power Thursday afternoon following a CUC pole fire. Officials said the fire happened on South Sound Road and was impacting customers in that area as well as Smith Road, Hospital Road and the Windsor Park area of George Town. CUC Crews were said to be out trying to restore the electricity supply to those people affected and said it had hoped to restore power to everyone by 5:30pm.

This latest CUC outage comes the day after the power supplier released its first quarter results, in which it claimed a 99.9% reliability rate. The company said it regretted the inconvenience caused to customers affected by this outage.

 

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  1. Anonymous says:

    Tesla powerwall. I will be the first to sign up if someone starts offerring installation

  2. SouthSounder says:

    9 hours with no power…OK CUC are you going to pay for me to replace all the stuff that began to thaw in my fridge?
    Third world supply, third world customer service, lousy attitude and extortionate prices…if you are going to hold us to ransom with your monopoly, then we deserve to have the law protect us against your incompetence….

  3. GR says:

    Because there was no power, I had to eat out. Can I send the restaurant bill to CUC and get a refund?

  4. Anonymous says:

    If telecommunication companies are slapped with a hefty fine if not delivering on the promised service, why can’t something like this not be applied to CUC?

    I had to have an electrician come out and install a surge protector at our main box because we suffered so many issues with our appliances, TV and computers despite them individually being plugged into surge protectors. Several times a week I come home to “blinking” clocks which indicates that at some stage the power went off long enough to disrupt the electricity flow to cause the electric clocks on the stove, microwave, alarm clocks etc to go down.

    CUC constantly denies that they have these “power dips” and “power surge” issues, and to try and prove that a broken appliance is the result of those dips and surges is next to impossible.

    In general, the consumers in Cayman have absolutely no recourse and are getting screwed by all kind of service providers. This must change!!!

    • Anonymous says:

      I live in westbay in Powell smith drive/Gunter link area we have outages every 6 to 8 weeks if not more sometimes,last month alone we had 6+ outages, 3 of which occurred in the space of 48hrs, and sometimes it goes during the day while we are at work and during the night when we are bed. When I complained to cuc that they have too many dwellings on one generator, the response I got was the recent losses of power in Wb and other surrounding areas was caused “by temporary loss of a generator that has initiated load shedding” and when my bill came for last month it was 60dollars more then usual. So it’s my guess that since it’s takes full power surge to kick all our electricial items back on after these outages, it increases your bill which cuc very kindly pass on to you to say pay us even more for our poor service!

    • Kenny says:

      Here goes the private sector again. The civil service improves but the private sector cannot keep pace.

      Maybe CUC should be taken over my the Government.

    • fedupofallbs says:

      and if your appliances or electronics are damaged CUC claims no liabilty to repair or replace the item …. even if you followed their customer care handbook to the T.

      also pay attention to the following :

      oct – apr bill drops dramaticly

      apr-oct it rises up even if you dont change one thing you do regularly thru the oct – apr month .

      anyone else experience this?

  5. Anonymous says:

    Every time Cuc loose power the Government should charge them $25,000 per hour until it returns.
    They make great money anually yet treat the employees like garbage.
    The reason why they have so much outage is poor maintenance on equipment (generators and power line washing.)
    Cuc was not this years ago just because they promoted these young Caymanian managers who only care about making money more than creating good customer service.
    Happy 50th birthday Cuc…..smh

  6. Anonymous says:

    Driving back from the EE a few weeks ago you could hear the electric boxes buzzing so loud every time we passed a pole. Serious question, is that something to worry about?

  7. Anonymous says:

    They had like 2 techs working on this problem. Power was out from I dunno when during the day until just before midnight for us. Use those profits to pay more people overtime in these situations, CUC. You dinks.

  8. Anonymous says:

    yeah, we’re in the South Church street area and lost power last night, and today, and as usual try calling and same old s*%t, they’re working on it and will have it restored as soon as possible, hours go by, still, no power! Even if they could have proper customer service and updates to explain what the hell is going on! And not to mention but they came and changed our meter to the new ones a couple weeks ago and a week ago we lost power for hours and i called and found out it WAS JUST US! An error in their computer system, shut our power off for hours! They said some other people were affected by this error also! This is the 3rd long power cut we’ve had in one week!

    I demand our Government to DEMAND that CUC come forward with exact reasons of all these power cuts and to have a better customer service system to explain things properly to us about why it’s off and when it will be turned back on. We must demand that CUC give us proper respect, especially for the ridiculous prices they charge us!

    This is not different than living in a third world country with all these dang power cuts, but we’re not paying the price of electricity that third world countries pay, we’re paying some of the highest prices in the WORLD but are now having to endure power outages often. I think it’s about the past 2 to 3 years now that Cayman is getting alot of power outages like a third world country!

    Why is CUC services gone down, there prices didn’t go down’?

    What’s going on with CUC?! I think it’s high time our Government cracks down on this monopoly! They’re killing us with high prices and now often power cuts!

    Our cost of living here is too high to have to endure the agony of so much power cuts!

    And the lack of proper customer service to properly explain to us at these times and giving us the same old bs line oh soon they will have it restored, yeah right, hours later!

    Disgusting!

    • Anonymous says:

      The answer is straight forward. CUC is operating its generators at near capacity. Don’t forget that the machinery is also aging and maintenance will only get worse. Solution is quite simple actually, Gov’t and private sector should be pushing for renewable energy alternatives. Its absolutely disgraceful that in 2016 that 99% of our energy production comes from fossil fuels.

  9. Anonymous says:

    5:30 pm??? our power went out around 10 pm last night and went back on at 6 am. that’s a solid 8 hours of total blackout. i was sweaty and only slept for 2 hours,

  10. Franco says:

    Increase revenue and 99% reliability what a bunch of “boloni” last night took the CUC emergency crew nearly 7 hours, in the Smith Rd – John Greer blvd area, to restore power, can someone explain why it took so long? A theory? How to increase profit margin with out inflating the rates? Decrease the manpower cost and the infrastructure maintenance. Proof last night: the pole fire most likely was cause by the salt accumulation, I do not see any longer the CUC tanker truck washing the hardware like they used to do years ago and the 7 hours that took the emergency crew to substitute the pole. I welcome a frank and genuine explanation from the CUC press office, please spare me the usual sterile cut and past apologies. I am still 99% hopeful the will not!

  11. Anonymous says:

    I don’t know where the information comes from but the entire John Greer Blvd did not have power restored until 6:35AM on Thursday morning, it was NOT a 1.5 Hour outage.

  12. Anonymous says:

    There was also a 1.5 hour power outage last night as a result of a pole fire.

    • SKEPTICAL says:

      Where was the report on last night’s outage – nothing on CNS, Cayman Compass, or CITN 27 TV News, today. Word of mouth reports said it was also a pole fire – on Smith Road. What causes these fires – salt build up on insulators allowing them to short out?

  13. Anonymous says:

    99.9% horse shit!

  14. Kittyboy says:

    I love that comments are closed on the CUC profit report. Why shouldn’t they make profits whilst we sweat in the darkness. Hey they’ll just up our bills and recoup the difference. Priceless.

    CNS: Comments are not closed on the full story on CNS Business. They are only closed on the snippet on the headline news site. Follow the link that says “Read more and comment on CNS Business”.

    • Kittyboy says:

      Okay, my bad on the links. But, the principle remains. We never get the truth from [them], and despite their crappy product we have to pay, and they have no consequences.

  15. Kittyboy says:

    Hahahahaha,
    What a farce, my power has gone off nearly daily for the past week. Forget lying Ted, we’ve got lying CUC.

    • Anonymous says:

      Thats true, I live on fairbanks road and it has been off frequently this week so much that I didn’t bother to reset the clocks after the third outage. CUC really sucks! A pole fire is an indication of sub-standard equipment or poor maintenance. They brag about their profits but they are guaranteed it while delivering an unreliable power supply. Its not just outages the spikes in voltage are bad too.

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