Three years, three January countrywide blackouts

Three years, three January countrywide blackouts

Most parts of the country were thrown into a prolonged state of darkness after power outage struck on Tuesday night, returning at midnight.

A statement released by Kenya Power faulted the power blackout on a “power system disturbance” and assured Kenyans that their engineers were “battling to identify the fault and restore power supply as quickly as possible.”

In an interesting twist of events, however, this is an all too familiar script to Kenyans after the same occurrence has been witnessed in the country over the past three years, all in the month of January; with two falling on the exact same date, and the other just a day shy.

On 9th January 2017, as President Kenyatta was paying a courtesy call to Kenya’s football legend Joe Kadenge in Mariakani, a power outage hit Kenya.

The 2017 blackout was blamed on a technical fault at the Ndenderu substation which affected the main electricity transmission line.

According to Kenya Power, the 2017 Ndenderu substation technical failure cut off supplies from the Olkaria geothermal fields to Nairobi, thereby causing a power outage which also affected the Coast as well as Mount Kenya regions.

“We regret any inconvenience caused by the outage,” said Kenya Power Network Management General Manager Eng. Daniel Tare during the 2017 blackout as he, again, assured the country that their team was “on the ground to normalize power supply as quickly as possible.”

On January 7 2016, there was another power blackout in most parts of the country.

In one of the most hilarious reasons provided yet, power provider KenGen blamed the blackout on a single rogue monkey.

“At 11:29 hours this morning, a monkey climbed on the roof of Gitaru Power Station and dropped onto a transformer tripping it. This caused other machines at the power station to trip on overload resulting in a loss of more than 180MW from this plant which triggered a national power blackout,” read the official statement from KenGen’s social media accounts.

It remains to be seen whether the consistent January power blackouts in Kenya over the past few years are genuine or not. What also remains to be seen is whether the same will be witnessed in January 2019.

Kenyans have picked up on the eerily coincidence and the sleuths are out to try and figure if there is something fishy going on.

 

Tags:

kengen president kenyatta Ndenderu substation Olkaria Geothermal fields Coincidences surrounding the repetitive January power black outs in Kenya Gitaru Power Station Kenya Power Corporate Communications Department Kenya’s football legend Joe Kadenge M0onkey causes black out power system disturbance

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