On Friday Enemalta CEO Jonathan Cardona said that things were apparently calming down when asked whether Malta was to expect more power cuts.
But a few hours later company technicians were battling with another night of widespread power cuts, which have been affecting the island all through the week.
Gozo was among the regions that was hit by a power cut on Friday/early Saturday, while others areas affected were Attard, DIngli, Mdina, Rabat, the Cottonera area and Zejtun.
Just after midnight, the company said on its Facebook page that it was “responding to 4 high voltage cable faults in different locations, as work continues on other sites”.
In a statement on Saturday morning, Enemalta said it is continuing to increase its resources to help customers with electricity supply interruptions due to network difficulties caused by the high temperatures of the ongoing heatwave.
Temperatures have been above 40 degrees Celsius for the past days – going down to the high 20s during the night – and are expected to remain so for the next few days. It is 40 degrees today Saturday, will go up to 41 degrees on Sunday and 42 on Monday and Tuesday before going down to 38 on Wednesday and further down to 33 on Thursday.
On Friday night, the company said it registered seven principal disturbances in the country’s high voltage network, mostly caused by underground cable faults.
In some of these outages, the company’s engineers and technicians restored supply to the affected customers in a short time by using alternative network connections in the same area.
Electricity supply to customers in parts of Dingli, Mdina, Rabat, Mtarfa, Ta’ Qali, Kalkara, Vittoriosa and Cospicua in Malta, and parts of Zebbug, Xaghra and Nadur in Gozo will be restored as soon as ongoing underground cable repairs are completed during the day, Enemalta said.
Enemalta CEO Jonathan Cardona said that the Company is allocating significant additional resources, and supporting its technical teams to repair damaged cables in the shortest time possible, so that the network’s flexibility and resilience can be restored.
Repairing cable faults is a lengthy process involving several teams of specialised workers and contractors, to locate the exact fault location along the underground cable’s route beneath local roads, excavate the location and then repair and test the damaged cable, so that it can once again be used to supply electricity to thousands of customers.
In the meantime, other Enemalta customer response teams continued responding to requests for assistance from customers reporting difficulties in their individual service, or faults affecting parts of a street or similar small areas.
Customers experiencing such difficulties can inform Enemalta by directly reporting the fault through the website’s fault reporting tool – enemalta.com.mt/report-power-cutform/, by calling the Company’s customer care team on 8007 2224 or by calling the Servizz.Gov Helpline 152.
Enemalta said it is using its SMS notification service to keep subscribed customers updated on faults and repairs affecting their electricity supply. The public can subscribe to this service by sending an SMS with the account holder’s ID Card number, on 79052492.