Charles Kong Soo

Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get says the black­out in To­ba­go on Good Fri­day was not due to hu­man er­ror but was caused by in­ter­fer­ence by top-lev­el man­age­ment.He was speak­ing in front of En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine's of­fices at the In­ter­na­tion­al Wa­ter­front Cen­tre, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day.

Deny­ing Ram­nar­ine's state­ment that it was an em­ploy­ee at the Cove pow­er plant in To­ba­go who was re­spon­si­ble for the black­out, Ro­get said: "It was not an op­er­a­tor's er­ror or low­er lev­el work­er's er­ror. It was a re­sult of top man­age­ment com­ing in and com­man­deer­ing the Cove pow­er plant and ac­tu­al­ly putting the ma­chines on fixed mode."Those ma­chines were in the cor­rect mode be­fore, which was re­al­ly fol­low­ing the pow­er fluc­tu­a­tions," he said.

A par­tic­u­lar area man­ag­er who was re­cent­ly sent to To­ba­go, on the heels of their forc­ing out an­oth­er area man­ag­er, is re­spon­si­ble for the shut­down and black­out in To­ba­go."He said the pow­er sup­ply went in Trinidad at 12.37 am but it did not go in To­ba­go un­til 1.30 am, al­most an hour lat­er, be­cause the ma­chines were in the cor­rect mode.

Ro­get ex­plained that if the pow­er sup­ply was lost from Trinidad, the To­ba­go pow­er plant would im­me­di­ate­ly pick up all of the load and con­tin­ue work­ing.He said this was the rea­son why OW­TU was rais­ing such "bold con­cerns" about peo­ple who were pro­mot­ed to high of­fice on the ba­sis of their po­lit­i­cal al­le­giance on­ly.

Ro­get said these po­lit­i­cal ap­pointees, who lacked the nec­es­sary com­pe­tence and ex­pe­ri­ence to do the job, were re­spon­si­ble for the loss­es at Petrotrin, the fact that no plants had been start­ed up af­ter two years, black­outs and in­dus­tri­al fa­tal­i­ties at T&TEC.Asked to com­ment on the time dis­par­i­ty on a clock at the Pe­nal pow­er sta­tion dur­ing Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's vis­it on Good Fri­day morn­ing, Ro­get said the con­tro­ver­sy had to do with high-rank­ing, top-lev­el of­fi­cials.

He said Per­sad-Bisses­sar's pres­ence at the pow­er sta­tion got in the way of nor­mal pro­ce­dures to al­low for smooth op­er­a­tions.Ro­get re­newed the union's call for an in­de­pen­dent in­quiry in­to the events that led to the black­outs, say­ing the re­al rea­sons must be iden­ti­fied and com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the peo­ple who were af­fect­ed.