Wednes­day’s black­out all but crip­pled the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate with most of the plants hav­ing to shut down. Tens of mil­lions of US dol­lars were lost in pro­duc­tion, which can­not now be re­cov­ered, re­sult­ing in a loss of mon­ey, and in par­tic­u­lar, for­eign ex­change to the coun­try.

In fact, al­most two days af­ter the in­ci­dent not all the plants were back in­to full pro­duc­tion be­cause the pow­er fail­ure meant the petro­chem­i­cal plants would have to be restart­ed safe­ly, which takes time.

Fitzroy Hare­wood, pres­i­dent of the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate As­so­ci­a­tion (PLEA) which rep­re­sents the petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­nies ad­mit­ted that many of them were down be­cause of the loss of elec­tric­i­ty and this cost mil­lions of US dol­lars.

“Yes the es­tate was dis­rupt­ed and a num­ber of plants came of­fline, some re­mained with par­tial op­er­a­tions based on their own in-house gen­er­a­tion and over the last day or two nor­mal­i­sa­tion ac­tiv­i­ties are on­go­ing.” Hare­wood told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

He added, “T&TEC would have dis­rupt­ed the op­er­a­tions of the es­tate and some of the plants are still in the process of com­ing back up or ful­ly back up.”

Here­wood re­vealed most of the plants on the es­tate were re­liant on T&TEC for their pow­er to op­er­ate.

On Wednes­day, Trinidad was plunged in­to a na­tion­wide black­out that went on for more than 12 hours be­fore pow­er was re­stored to the en­tire coun­try. T&TEC has so far, said the prob­lem em­anat­ed from a tech­ni­cal fault and that led to a cas­cade of events.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley has since called for an in­ves­ti­ga­tion as the black­out hurt the econ­o­my and is thought to have con­tributed to a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of crim­i­nal events in­clud­ing mur­ders, rob­beries and even the fire-bomb­ing of a house.

Asked to quan­ti­fy the ex­tend of the loss­es the pres­i­dent of PLEA was re­luc­tant but ad­mit­ted it was in the mil­lions of US dol­lars.

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions chal­lenges

Not on­ly was the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate se­vere­ly af­fect­ed, but the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in­fra­struc­ture was al­so placed un­der a lot of pres­sure. On Wednes­day, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple re­lied on their mo­bile phones and da­ta to con­tact their loved ones and keep abreast with what was hap­pen­ing.

But how re­li­able is T&T’s dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture sys­tem es­pe­cial­ly in a time of cri­sis?

Dig­i­cel told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian that for most of its cus­tomers, the net­work de­liv­ered on its promise to en­sure re­li­able con­nec­tiv­i­ty de­spite the chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, with hun­dreds of cell sites strate­gi­cal­ly placed through­out the coun­try, Dig­i­cel quick­ly ac­ti­vat­ed its ro­bust cri­sis man­age­ment plan when the out­age oc­curred.

It ex­plained this in­clud­ed cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion, tech­ni­cal up­dates, site man­age­ment and lo­gis­tics co­or­di­na­tion to mit­i­gate the im­pact.

“The re­sult was that most cus­tomers had con­tin­u­ous ac­cess to their mo­bile voice and da­ta ser­vices but the com­pa­ny recog­nis­es that many peo­ple had their ser­vice im­pact­ed by re­duced cov­er­age, es­pe­cial­ly as the time frame of the pow­er out­age ex­tend­ed,” Dig­i­cel said.

Fur­ther, it not­ed that “with an all hands on deck ap­proach,” Dig­i­cel’s tech­ni­cal team and con­trac­tors worked be­hind the scenes in­to the wee hours of the morn­ing in­stalling and re­fu­elling gen­er­a­tors, mon­i­tor­ing bat­ter­ies and net­work per­for­mance and man­ag­ing in­fra­struc­ture that was at the risk of go­ing of­fline.

Dig­i­cel CEO Abra­ham Smith said, “I al­ways say that the re­al strength of our com­pa­ny is in the peo­ple. We have the best em­ploy­ees who care deeply about our cus­tomers.

“When the black­out oc­curred, we im­me­di­ate­ly en­sured that all of our core net­work el­e­ments were prop­er­ly work­ing and that the ma­jor gen­er­a­tors and back up pow­er sup­plies kicked in. Over­all, our bat­ter­ies held out well and our core net­work was sol­id. “

Smith said Dig­i­cel de­ployed three sets of teams through­out the coun­try; one team en­sured that the gen­er­a­tors and bat­ter­ies at the var­i­ous sites kicked in and where they did not, tech­ni­cians vis­it­ed these lo­ca­tions to man­u­al­ly turn them on.

The sec­ond team de­ployed tem­po­rary gen­er­a­tors in hub lo­ca­tions to en­sure that key ar­eas main­tained ser­vice qual­i­ty and the third team mon­i­tored fu­el lev­els, and re­fu­elled gen­er­a­tors as need­ed, Abra­ham added.

He al­so not­ed that these work­ers “left their fam­i­lies be­hind and worked in the dark­ness,” adding that due to their ef­forts, more than 65 per cent of Dig­i­cel’s sites main­tained their in­tegri­ty through­out the black­out.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, from 2020 to present, Dig­i­cel has in­vest­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly TT$8m di­rect­ly in­to ex­pan­sion costs of its mo­bile net­work, which pro­vides cov­er­age for 98.2 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion.

The in­vest­ments in­clude the in­stal­la­tion of bat­tery back­up and gen­er­a­tors on ma­jor cell sites.

Smith added that as more cus­tomers joined the Dig­i­cel net­work, the com­pa­ny would con­tin­ue to make in­vest­ments in­to even bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy and ma­chin­ery to en­sure that “come what may,” they would stay re­li­ably con­nect­ed.

The Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian al­so reached out to TSTT re­gard­ing and ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny, TSTT has en­gi­neered most of its net­work to main­tain ser­vice in ad­verse events in­clud­ing those trig­gered by loss of com­mer­cial pow­er.

It ex­plained that this was part of TSTT’s dis­as­ter busi­ness con­tin­gency plan­ning.

The com­pa­ny added that TSTT’s main net­work sites were equipped with stand­by gen­er­a­tors which were fu­elled and main­tained as part of TSTT’s reg­u­lar pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance sched­ules.

“The gen­er­a­tors kick in when com­mer­cial pow­er is lost and have the ca­pac­i­ty to pro­vide 24 hours of run time pow­er­ing our net­work equip­ment,” the com­pa­ny said.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, it said, most of its re­mote mo­bile sites were equipped with stand­by bat­ter­ies en­gi­neered to pro­vide at least four hours of re­serve ca­pac­i­ty in the event of a loss or in­ter­rup­tion in com­mer­cial pow­er.

“We cur­rent­ly have 610 lo­ca­tions with vary­ing tech­nolo­gies, (2G,3G, and 4G). Some of those lo­ca­tions have back up gen­er­a­tors and some have bat­tery back up pow­er. While de­signed to last up to four hours, based on load, the back up ca­pa­bil­i­ty can be less.

“Giv­en that the out­age last­ed over four hours, some of those lo­ca­tions went in­to out­age and cus­tomers would have ex­pe­ri­enced chal­lenges ac­cess­ing voice and da­ta ser­vices on the mo­bile net­work,” TSTT said.

Not­ing that some cus­tomers would al­so have ex­pe­ri­enced, “for a short pe­ri­od of time, dif­fi­cul­ty ac­cess­ing da­ta on their mo­bile de­vices,” TSTT ex­plained it al­le­vi­at­ed this chal­lenge by im­ple­ment­ing a tem­po­rary APN by­pass.

“Al­though that was reg­u­larised quick­ly, some cus­tomers would not have had ser­vice if they were in prox­im­i­ty to lo­ca­tions where the bat­tery back up pow­er ran out.

“Our team ac­tive­ly mon­i­tored the sit­u­a­tion and re­mained in close con­tact with the util­i­ty provider and fu­el part­ners through­out the or­deal,” TSTT said.

It added that by 1 am on Feb­ru­ary 17, 9 per cent of its nodes were back in ser­vice and by 10 am ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 per cent of its cell sites were on air.

In 2010, TSTT said, it in­vest­ed in a “world-class” Da­ta Cen­tre which was the first in the re­gion to achieve TIA-942-B (Rat­ed 3), DCOS ma­tu­ri­ty lev­el 3, and SOC Type 2 in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

TSTT added that it op­er­at­ed the on­ly da­ta cen­tre in the re­gion with this lev­el of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for fa­cil­i­ties and op­er­a­tions.

Fur­ther, the com­pa­ny said, in 2017 it launched bCloud, the re­gion’s first and on­ly VMware Cloud Ver­i­fied ser­vice, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for lo­cal en­ter­pris­es to ben­e­fit from an on-is­land cloud ser­vice with­out com­pro­mis­ing the qual­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty that may be de­rived from an in­ter­na­tion­al provider.

“On Feb­ru­ary 16, the re­dun­dan­cy we en­gi­neered per­formed as de­signed. De­spite the loss of com­mer­cial pow­er, all Da­ta Cen­tre and Cloud Ser­vices were not im­pact­ed. There was 100 per cent up­time and all sys­tems re­mained ful­ly func­tion­al,” TSTT said.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing im­pact­ed

The man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor al­so took a hit dur­ing the black­out.

Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) Tri­cia Coos­al said the ma­jor­i­ty of man­u­fac­tur­ers were neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by the un­planned out­age.

She not­ed that while some small and medi­um sized man­u­fac­tur­ers had gen­er­a­tors which mit­i­gat­ed the im­pact, there were chal­lenges, neg­a­tive fall­out and loss of in­come for SMEs.

“Some en­ti­ties’ ma­chines had to be restart­ed or prod­ucts on the pro­duc­tion line had to be dis­card­ed as a re­sult of the long wait time for the re­turn of elec­tric­i­ty,” Coos­al ex­plained.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, she said, mem­bers al­so re­port­ed loss of in­come due to a loss of shift in their op­er­a­tions.

Fur­ther, Coos­al said, op­er­a­tors who de­pend­ed on cold stor­age for their goods were par­tic­u­lar­ly hit hard, adding that those with­out back up gen­er­a­tors ex­pe­ri­enced loss of goods, in­ven­to­ry and raw ma­te­r­i­al.

“Some are wary that this loss in stock would re­sult in de­lays in get­ting goods (es­pe­cial­ly food and bev­er­age items) in­to the mar­ket space. This can have a re­sult­ing im­pact on sup­ply and oth­er pos­si­ble neg­a­tive out­comes,” she added.

Gen­er­al eco­nom­ic im­pact

Econ­o­mist Vaalmik­ki Ar­joon who shared some eco­nom­ic in­sights about the black­out de­scribed it as “cal­lous and un­ac­cept­able in these times,” adding that it fur­ther high­light­ed that cus­tomers did not get val­ue for mon­ey when they paid tax­es and util­i­ties.

“The de­gree of fi­nan­cial stress and loss­es en­dured by the pri­vate sec­tor due to the pan­dem­ic means that every bit of earn­ings that can be re­alised is es­sen­tial.

“A pow­er out­age of that na­ture brought much eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty to a stand­still and forced many to close their busi­ness op­er­a­tions quite ear­ly, cost­ing most sec­tors al­most a day of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty loss and rev­enues—monies need­ed not on­ly to pay staff and oth­er op­er­at­ing costs but oth­er ex­pens­es such as loan pay­ments, in­sur­ance ex­pens­es etc,” Ar­joon ex­plained.

This, he said, would have been worse for those that were open main­ly in the evenings such as restau­rants.

Fur­ther, Ar­joon said, small­er com­pa­nies would have been more vul­ner­a­ble, as many did not have a back-up gen­er­a­tor and did not ben­e­fit from economies of scale as the large com­pa­nies did.

“In­deed, sev­er­al would not deem it eco­nom­i­cal to own a gen­er­a­tor, giv­en the cost of pur­chas­ing one, its main­te­nance and test­ing, the tech­ni­cal know-how re­quired in con­nect­ing one to the elec­tri­cal grid and the safe­ty risks in­volved,” he added.