GIFF JOHNSON
Anytime there are westerly winds, Majuro’s downtown area can expect to take a hit.
The overnight Sunday into early Monday winds ramped up quickly, turning the normally placid DUD lagoon area into a boiling caldron of waves that upended boats, tore vessels off moorings, and beached several craft.
But it wasn’t only on the water that damage was felt from the high winds from a nearby “tropical disturbance.”
Winds knocked down a power pole by Jitak in Delap, which had the knock-on impact of bringing down a second pole by MJCC. This caused an all-day outage as MEC distribution crews worked to install new poles and all of the wiring to get power restored to the downtown by around 8pm Monday night. There were still some locations where power was off in downtown.
Meantime, the same morning, high winds upended a large tree in the Jeirok area of Laura, sending it across power lines, and shutting off power to the village. Local residents worked with MEC Monday morning to cut up the tree that blocked the lagoon side road as well as damaging power lines.
While power was off island-wide from around 5am, for the power plant to Arrak, power was restored by around 6:30am.
Although MEC announced in a text message Monday at 7:10pm, “We expect power to be fully restored to all affected areas, including Laura Village, by 8pm tonight,” repair work in Laura didn’t start until after 8pm.
Ultimately power was not restored to Laura until 9am Tuesday.
This was largely because MEC has only one bucket truck and its was in operation until 8pm or later at the Jitak repair site assisting the installation of the two power poles. Once that was completed, the bucket truck went to Laura so that repairs could commence overnight Monday.
Then when MEC work on the lines in Laura wrapped up Tuesday morning, the bucket truck returned to town to continue work on power lines.
It was still fixing the new power pole at the Jitak site Tuesday night.