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Cause of ASPA’s weekend outage found

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reporters@samoanews.com

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — At 10a.m. this past Saturday, field crews from the American Samoa Power Authority (ASPA) were able to fix the underground power lines that caused the tie-line to trip and not allow power from the Satala power plant to reach the Tafuna power plant. This is according to an ASPA announcement.

Crews were working since 1 a.m. that morning to uncover all the manholes along the road to Fagaalu, testing each line. The damaged lines were discovered in Nuuuli by the old Hong Kong Restaurant, as well as the area in Matu’u, near Aveina Bros.

“The damaged lines are suspected to have been damaged by last Sunday’s lightning surge,” said ASPA, adding that this was what caused the fault for the power outage this past weekend. (The island-wide blackout a week ago Sunday, Sept. 8th, was due to a lightning surge that struck the main switchboard at the ASPA Tafuna power plant around 10:35 p.m. Power was out for a few minutes in some areas of the east side while the west side was out for hours. The power came back on at around 4:30 a.m. Monday, Sept. 9th, but then went off again for several hours.)

Meanwhile, on social media, hundreds of local residents are applauding the work of the ASPA crew, not only those who were out during the wee hours trying to restore electricity, but also the water division employees who were out ensuring that water pressure remained steady.