Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was forced to stop a post-Cab­i­net me­dia brief­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, White­hall, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, af­ter a pow­er dis­rup­tion oc­curred.

The root of the prob­lem was said to be a tech­ni­cal is­sue in the con­trol room with the break­er sys­tem. The me­dia brief­ing be­gan at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2.39 pm and was be­ing broad­cast live on all ma­jor lo­cal tele­vi­sion sta­tions and on­line.

How­ev­er, three min­utes in­to giv­ing his open­ing re­marks about Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, the lights went out.

Star­tled by what had tran­spired, the Prime Min­is­ter asked, “What is go­ing on here?”

The dark­ness al­so came as a shock to every­one present, in­clud­ing sev­er­al Gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, the PM’s staff and the me­dia. Row­ley apol­o­gised and told re­porters, “We can’t func­tion like this, can we?”

He then left the podi­um and ex­it­ed the room. He al­so rec­om­mend­ed a change in lo­ca­tion to an­oth­er part of White­hall if pow­er did not re­turn with­in min­utes.

Oth­er parts of the build­ing had elec­tric­i­ty. At ap­prox­i­mate­ly 3.06 pm, the Prime Min­is­ter re­turned and an­nounced that a tech­ni­cal is­sue was the cause, bring­ing re­lief to any­one think­ing there was a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty threat.

Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Faris Al-Rawi al­so said a “hard restart” was done and that some tests would be done be­fore the me­dia con­fer­ence re­sumed.

There were no fur­ther in­ter­rup­tions and the me­dia con­fer­ence went on for an­oth­er hour.