For a country with an electricity supply that’s reliable enough that it’s taken for granted, the blackout in the early hours of this morning was highly unusual. Almost 150K residential households and commercial customers were affected in the outage that lasted 38 minutes.
The blackout struck at 1:18 AM in 19 areas all over Singapore: Boon Lay, Choa Chu Kang, Clementi, Jurong, Pandan Loop, Aljunied, Geylang, Tanjong Rhu, Mountbatten, Kembangan, Bedok, East Coast, Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Thomson, Mandai, Admiralty, Sembawang and Woodlands.
It struck me as being rather unusual that the blackout did not affect any one specific region in Singapore. The areas listed above are in the north, south, east, west, and even in central regions. The central business district and main shopping belts are notably missed.
Yet more interesting is that for a highly efficient city government like Singapore’s, 18 hours after the incident, we still aren’t provided with additional details about what caused the blackout. The only explanation offered to us, since early this morning, is that:
due to a partial loss of supply from two power generation units
I like to know more. I think there are others who would like to know more too. More information will be good..
We are very fortunate that the blackout happened in the early hours of the morning. It happened at the hour with, probably, the least impact. Most people were asleep. They either slept through, or woke up because of a stuffy room wondering why their air-con wasn’t running, but by then the electricity supply might have already been restored so they simply turned their air-con back on and returned to sleep.
Good thing too that the blackout happened after the F1 race weekend. I know the electricity for the street lights on the F1 race track is generated on-site, but it would still nonetheless have been a very embarrassing incident for Singapore.
We’ve been lucky this time, but we shouldn’t take this incident lightly.
Can the EMA please give us more information? Or do we have a blackout on this blackout?
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