TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Island wide blackout

Announcement from GEBE
From GEBE:

We are experiencing an island wide black out. Our team of engineers and technicians are currently investigating the cause. Please bear with us, as the (cause) / information is not readily available.

Again? Jeez louise. Hopefully it's back on this morning.

OMG. Yesterday was Saturday and the electric was out at the airport....

OMG!! Do they really NOT have their own generators at the airport for such emergencies?

Apparently the generator doesn't work. It didn't work on June 21 when we left SXM, and didn't work yesterday either.

Island-wide?

Isn’t French-side power provided by EDF, or has something changed from decades ago when I used to get an invoice from them?

I never see notices that EDF has an outage.

As to generators, maintenance isn’t that hard. Annual or semi-annual oil changes and air filter replacements are easy, and so are fuel filter replacements, Anything beyond that likely requires a field technician with a laptop. In a normal world, backup generators run for only a few dozen hours each year, and much of that is monthly testing. In a GEBE world, who knows.

Still, generator failures happen, and that’s when you call in a factory-trained tech who has factory software on their laptop, and expect to pay big bucks if they come from off-island.

"From GEBE:
At approximately 2: 27 PM, on July 3, 2021, the power plant experienced an unknown issue which resulted in a island wide (Dutch side) blackout.
Ensuing an in depth investigation, the power plant engineers alongside the onsite field service technicians of Wartsila discovered that a few parameters needed to be adjusted as the power plant is currently in the final test phase of the newly Server base system upgrade.
N.V GEBE would like to thank the general public for their patience throughout the system upgrade as the company looks towards a more reliable power system."

Bahston--Yes, when they say "island wide", they mean the Dutch side only, which is serviced by GEBE. The French side has a different electric provider.

As far as not maintaining the generator, well, this is St Maarten we are talking about, and GEBE.. They have no clue what they are doing, 90% of the time.

GEBE’s acronym is ‘Gives Everything But Electricity’, is deservingly so fitting.😎

Got to love the ineptness. Just like with the airport debacle.

How PJIA deals with this.
https://www.smn-news.com/st-maarten...ng-island-wide-electricity-failures.html

Does anyone have an update on the outage? I am supposed to be arriving on Saturday. Thanks

We are here now and it hasn't affected our stay one bit.

Living in Florida, which is often impacted by Tropical weather, we have a whole house, standby generator. It automatically starts itself every Sunday morning and runs for 15 minutes to charge it's battery. Every time it starts, it sends me an email. If it tries to start and is unable to do so, it sends me an email. There is no legitimate excuse for a standby generator not working when it's needed, unless the problem has cropped up during the past week. Incompetence, if you ask me.

bdeeley--do you have a generator there??

Can you loan the generator to GEBE?

Carol,
It's the RAT! Jeez. You people forget everything!
Cheers
irina

I couldn't fit it in my luggage. I was going to ask Kim to run an extension cord here if needed.