Major Hong Kong power cut caused by use of 10-year-old backup cable, HK Electric says
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The firm said late on Thursday that staff members at a switching station had connected a backup cable, last used more than 10 years ago, by mistake in the early hours of Wednesday and caused the outages.
“This activated an automatic protection mechanism and affected the electricity supply,” Francis Cheng Cho-ying, the HK Electric operations director, explained.
Ip Sung-tai, HK Electric’s general manager, said the backup cable was not marked on the circuit diagram of the station and the company was still investigating why it had not been included.
Cheng emphasised that the power cut was a “rare” and “one-off” incident and that the company would stick to its deal with the government when asked whether it would issue tariff subsidies as compensation to customers.
Wednesday’s outage, caused by a voltage dip, lasted 48 minutes, from 12.49am to 1.37am.
