The GSD has said that yesterday's complete power outage “exposed serious questions” on resilience, preparedness of the infrastructure and contractor supervision that the Government must answer. 

A statement continued: “It is wholly insufficient for them to simply pass the buck on these issues when they ultimately have responsibility for our utilities. The Government has, so far, failed to ensure the right infrastructure and working practices to deliver an uninterrupted supply of power to Gibraltar. 

1. Resilience 

“It is imperative that the distribution network’s resilience is fortified, and the Government must deliver on securing this greater resilience. We cannot continue to suffer general blackouts when a fault or damage occurs in one specific area and greater efforts must be made to ringfence the fault and to safeguard the continued supply to all other areas. Many people will ask themselves the question why a fault in one area needs to lead to an absolute blackout across Gibraltar. Why is a fault not containable to one area? 

2. Contractor supervision 

“The irony of a Government sub-contracted party being the root cause of the power outage cannot go unmentioned and we question the lack of adequate GEA supervision of works in such a mission-critical location. Ultimately, this was Minister Arias-Vasquez’ much trumpeted scheme that would deliver greater resilience to the grid. That it produced the opposite because of insufficient supervision is, in itself, incredible. 

“The mere dishing out of plans denoting cable location to sub-contractors is, for a variety of reasons, an ineffective method of preventing these types of accidents as we have witnessed all too often in the past. The GEA could and should insist on the supervision and authorisation of such works by one of their members of staff, particularly in critical locations. This cost can be borne by the contractor and should, theoretically, bring an end to interruptions to supply of this nature.”

The GSD’s Craig Sacarello commented, “It is completely unacceptable that Gibraltar experiences two power outages within less than 2 weeks, the latter wiping out the supply to our entire population.

“The harmful impact on businesses across the board has resulted in losses being suffered and many families were unable to go about their day-to-day lives in the normal manner when all of this was avoidable. Questions around citizen safety are also raised with the failure of our traffic light system, all police telephone lines and our emergency services being stretched thin on the ground in having to attend lift failures across Gibraltar. 

“The town area was out of power until after 10 at night, including hotels and restaurants, which does not reflect well on our tourist trade. The Government needs to take responsibility for its failure to ensure that the right measures have not been put in place over their nearly 14 years of governing Gibraltar. They now need to deliver on implementing much-improved resilience and adequate levels of GEA supervision to contractor works which will prevent these entirely avoidable events from occurring.”