By Chantalé Fletcher
A proposal will be made in Cabinet for an in-depth and independent investigation into the island-wide power outage on Wednesday.
Minister of Energy and Energy Industries and Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister Stuart Young spoke at a Ministry of National Security press conference on Thursday to address concerns over Wednesday’s blackout.
The decision to propose an investigation came out from an emergency National Security Council meeting held on Thursday morning which was chaired by Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Young said.
He said a decision was taken from the meeting.
Young said, “There will be a proposal to Cabinet and we expect Cabinet to agree to it, adopt it and go forward with it, an in-depth independent investigation.
“We will put together a small team of independent experts both with respect to the power generation and distribution side, this was independent of the power producers which were Trinity, Powergen, TGU and the distributor T&TEC, as well as on the National Security side.”
The minister said the importance of national security in these events was critical.
Young added that the independent bodies will investigate what happened and come up with recommendations for consideration to both prevent any future occurrence of this type and to ensure to build capacity and redundancy in the power grid system.
He said, “We are going to have this done very shortly within the shortest possible time frame.”
Young also indicated there were no issues with relation to the supply of gas during the blackout.
Meanwhile, Acting Commissioner of Police Mc Donald Jacob commended his officers for their efforts together with joint work done with the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force during the power outage.
