General Manager of DOMLEC, Dwayne Cenac, has said the company is taking measures to prevent power outages caused by wildlife after a manicou cut off electricity to the entire north, and large swathes of northeastern parts of the island recently.
Speaking on the company’s Power Talk program on Monday, he did not specify what measures were being taken but said that DOMLEC is hoping there isn’t a reoccurrence.
“Of course, we don’t want a reoccurrence of it, so since then we have taken some action where we were able to take some mitigating measures to prevent future occurrences,”” he said.
“It is a temporary measure right now and we are working to have a permanent solution.”
On March 24, DOMLEC reported the outage in the north and said a manicou was the culprit. The story generated great interest and was followed by a flood of memes on social media. It was widely published on Caribbean news sites as far as Trinidad with even French newspapers picking it up.
However, according to Cenac, power outages caused by wildlife is nothing new.
“One of the most common [ones] is caused by birds,” he explained.
“Just as a bird may bridge two different lines, get electrocuted and create a fault [in] our system, similarly an animal that walks or crawls can climb up onto energized equipment, get in contact with the energized part of the equipment while still in contact with the grounded parts, the parts that you should be able to touch. When that happens current flows from the energized parts through the animal down to the grounded parts and that causes electrocution.”
He added, “Yes, the animal suffers but what you have is a fault and the system would react to ensure that power is cut off because you don’t know what created the fault. So the system would react to create these outages, tripping off power essentially to the energized equipment. Unfortunately apart from just tripping sometimes you can have collateral 
damages in terms of equipment damage and with equipment damage you have to then respond to it, which takes time. There is a repair process. Obviously, you have to get the parts first from your stores and all of that combines and you have time going into it and outage and unhappy customers.”
He did acknowledge the stir the incident caused on social media and the memes that followed saying it was interesting to see the creativity of DOMLEC customers.
“But on our side, it was not all fun and [games],” he stated. “We had a [prolonged] outage and we [had] some equipment failure and of course, we had to take action to try and avoid future occurrences.”
Cenac pointed out that the transformer affected during the manicou incident has been in existence for over 40 years and the company has never had such a major occurrence.
“We suffered that outage, we took some [measures] and we hopefully wouldn’t have a reoccurrence anytime soon,” he remarked.
