The lights in the tunnel went out early yesterday afternoon, but Wichit Traffic Police told The Phuket News that they were not informed of the outage until 2am today.
“The lights are still out, so please careful driving through the tunnel,” one officer said this morning.
Songyod Tuangsin, the chief safety officer at the Phuket office of the Highways Department, said that workers dispatched to investigate the outage discovered that the fault lay with an overloaded transformer.
“We set up a temporary power supply for the lights before dawn this morning to make sure the lights were working during rush hour today,” Mr Songyod said.
“This will continue to power the lights until 10pm tonight, when we will close off all traffic through the underpass so we can make proper repairs,” he added.
“Both the southbound and the northbound lanes will be closed at the same time from 10pm through to 5am tomorrow,” Mr Songyod confirmed.
“During that time we will change the transformer and make repairs to any lights affected by the overload,” he said.
“For safety reasons, we need to fix this as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience caused to motorists,” Mr Songyod added.