ELECTRICITY supply to Koh Larn island off Pattaya resumed at 4.30 p.m. today (June 14) after an outage since 10.30 a.m. in the morning led to some tourists asking hotels on the island to refund of their room rent, TV Channel 7 and Naewna newspaper said this evening.
The power supply to the whole island was cut after a Pattaya City administration’s backhoe excavating the beach in front of Phra Tamnak Soi 5 to repair a high-mast light pole hit an underground cable of the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) and damaged it at 10.30 a.m.
Mr. Rungroj Chanmanit, PEA’s Chonburi manager, and Mr. Sittipong Buakla, PEA’s Pattaya manager, brought a team to the spot where the cable had snapped to repair it and this was completed at 4.30 p.m. with power then flowing again to Koh Larn.
It had been estimated that it would take 10 hours to repair the cable but the team succeeded in fixing it much sooner.
PEA has a backup plan and has installed an emergency generator on the island but this could not supply emergency power to the whole island while hotels that also had such generators were told to run them.
To prevent a recurrence of power cut to the island PEA will be posting signs indicating the direction of the high-voltage line. In the long term concrete slabs will be placed over the line to prevent excavation and drilling from hitting it.
However, Mr. Suphan Tophae, operator of a resort on Koh Larn, said after the power cut tourists started asking for a refund of their room rent.
The outage also affected shops and restaurants along the island’s beach because of inability to refrigerate fresh seafood with their losses amounting to over a million baht.
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The spot on Pattaya beach where a backhoe digging to repair a high-mast light pole hit the high-voltage cable feeding electricity to the whole of Koh Larn. Photos: Naewna
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