Firefighters swamped with lift rescue calls after powercut

Monday 27 January 2014

Firefighters had an unusual call-out this morning - a dog trapped in a lift with its owner.

The call was one of eight received by the Jersey Fire & Rescue Service to rescue five Islanders (and one Labrador) who were trapped in lifts when the Island’s power went out. The Service only has two sets of lift keys and had to work their way through all the call-outs one at a time but it meant a 40 minute wait for one unlucky Islander.

And it was a busy morning for lift engineer company OTIS who had to deal with eight different incidents of people stuck in lifts.  

Much of the Island was brought to a standstill when the power went out at around 9.15am.  Jersey Electricity immediately fired up the turbines at La Collette and power was restored to the business district of St Helier after about 20 minutes.

Jersey Electricity were inundated with calls and the company's CEO Chris Ambler apologised to customers for the problem which is believed to have been caused by a lightening strike in France and which also cut supplies to Guernsey.

He said: “We immediately invoked our normal emergency restoration procedures from La Collette Power Station and our plant at Queen’s Road.

“La Collette underwent a major update of the generation plant last year and is capable of meeting the demand of the entire Island.”

Restoration had to be done in stages to reconnect to the Island’s Normandie 2 cable with France but some parts of the Island were without electricity for more than two hours.

The JEC is still investigating the matter with their French partners RTE.

The company have been working on a new cable link with France for the last eight years. Normandie 3 is due to be commissioned next year and a spokesman for the company said this will go some way to helping alleviate these problems.