Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Nizam Baksh was part of a mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary team vis­it­ing the TSTT Diego Mar­tin Ex­change on yes­ter­day morn­ing in the af­ter­math of heavy rain and flood­ing on Sat­ur­day. Baksh walked through the fa­cil­i­ty along with TSTT's Chair­man Ever­ald Snag­gs, the util­i­ty's act­ing CEO Di­ana DeS­ousa and oth­er TSTT ex­ec­u­tives along with per­son­nel from the Diego Mar­tin Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion and T&TEC which, just 24 hours ear­li­er was un­der 15 feet of wa­ter in some places.

The flood cut a path of de­struc­tion at the Ex­change de­stroy­ing a 50-foot wall at the back of the com­pound, a 30-foot ca­bling bridge that used to pass over the Diego Mar­tin riv­er in­to the ex­change and at least eight ve­hi­cles that were parked on the com­pound at the time. Al­so on Sat­ur­day, in the base­ment of the Ex­change, the back­up pow­er equip­ment and elec­tri­cal break­ers that reg­u­lat­ed the pub­lic elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply were com­plete­ly sub­merged un­der 8 feet of wa­ter.

By 12.15 pm on Sat­ur­day the ex­change was com­plete­ly off air and mo­bile, broad­band, sub­scrip­tion TV and fixed-line ser­vices to thou­sands of cus­tomers were dis­rupt­ed. The Min­is­ter and oth­er of­fi­cials saw the de­struc­tion first hand and the progress made by TSTT per­son­nel over the ini­tial 24 hours since the flood­ing start­ed. Voice, da­ta and video ser­vices were be­ing re­stored through­out the night and day and the group was brought up to speed on the next set of pri­or­i­ties at the Ex­change.

Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Of­fi­cer George Hill cau­tioned that the ex­change would be us­ing back­up pow­er sources for the fore­see­able fu­ture be­cause the main elec­tri­cal in­fra­struc­ture was se­vere­ly com­pro­mised. Hill said: "Our elec­tri­cal en­gi­neers have to make a thor­ough in­spec­tion of all the elec­tri­cal com­po­nents that were un­der­wa­ter and en­sure that their in­tegri­ty is re­stored be­fore we can re­con­nect to the T&TEC sup­ply.

That will take a con­sid­er­able amount of time, up to sev­er­al weeks. In the in­ter­im, the sta­tion will be us­ing the stand­by pow­er equip­ment we had to truck in overnight (Sat­ur­day) and ad­di­tion­al equip­ment we have to bring in to­day while at­tempt­ing to sal­vage the pow­er sys­tems that were af­fect­ed by the flood."