With some relief after days of hard work following Hurricane Melissa's passage through eastern Cuba, Carlos Rafael Arias Sobrino, director general of the Las Tunas Electric Company, confirmed that electricity service has been restored to all customers. However, he remarked that the path to full normalization still faces obstacles due to interruptions and a transformer shortage.
Las Tunas, Cuba.– Arias Sobrino explained the complex restoration process. "More than 3,000 kilometers of transmission, sub-transmission, and distribution networks have been repaired. This effort has allowed the province's 194,000 customers to have electricity once again, including those who lost it from the moment the storm plunged the region into darkness."
The manager emphasizes that the work is not yet fully completed; the main problem they are currently dealing with is the transformer banks. "We still need to restore some transformer banks. Not all the damage is a direct consequence of the cyclone; rather, it is compounded by a pre-existing problem: the shortage of transformers.
"As of Tuesday, November 11, we had 17 damaged transformers. However, we already have solutions for approximately 11 of them."
The municipalities with the most significant problems in this regard are Puerto Padre, “Jesús Menéndez,” and the provincial capital. These areas are also among the 630 service interruptions that the province experienced on Wednesday morning. It should be noted that many of these outages are reported after the electrical grids have been energized, a common occurrence in large-scale restoration processes.
"We must keep in mind that we are talking about thousands of kilometers of power lines." There may also be damage to the electrical wiring of some homes, which is not technically the company's direct responsibility, but it does impact the final service to the customer.
Although linemen crews from several municipalities in Las Tunas province departed for Santiago de Cuba province, an area severely affected by the storm, Arias Sobrino assured that there are still personnel in the province to continue the necessary recovery work and address any new outages that may arise. The situation in Las Tunas thus reflects significant progress; however, the stability of the electrical system is still being built piece by piece, facing both the ravages of nature and material limitations.
