Swathes of heavy residential areas and their key neighbourhood businesses were left powerless today as the electricity supply shut down at 1:20pm.
Repeated calls to the PPEA – and even to the PEA main headquarters in Bangkok – resulted in confusing and oblique explantions as to the unscheduled outage.
After the power supply was finally restored at 3:45pm, an official at the Phuket PEA office, who asked not to be named, said, “The equipment is broken, we fixed the load break switch again.”
Exactly which “load break switch” failed and reasons as to why it failed were not forthcoming, though one officer said that the power outage followed residents saying that the power went out in their areas after heavy rain.
Another officer at the PEA main office in Phuket said his office was unable to confirm exactly which areas went without power, but confirmed that “areas near Wirat Hongyok Rd, Phra Phuket Keaw Rd and the bypass road” were affected.
Another officer noted that the power out started in front of Index on the bypass road and included in front of the Shell petrol station on Phra Phuket Kaew Rd in Kathu.
Suwat Prompriang from the Patong PEA office confirmed that Patong was unaffected by the blackout.
“It did not affect the Patong area at all, because we have own power supply (lines) which are separate from those that serve Phuket City, Kathu, Rawai and Chalong,” he said.