Blackouts concern businesses

By ELIAS LARI
BUSINESSES in Mt Hagen are concerned over continuous power blackouts which have been affecting their operations.
The concern was raised by two fast food operators and a bakery owner.
Fast food operator Joseph Kauli said blackouts were experienced almost daily in the Western Highlands capital.
He said this was affecting their operations and they needed the national power company, PNG Power, to explain why their service was poor and what they were doing about improving it.
Kauli said operating costs were high and blackouts were only adding to that hardship.
PNG Power, yesterday, clarified that apart from the Ramu hydropower station shutdown over the weekend and the system fault yesterday.
It said last weekend it had feeder two defect-earth fault caused by a damaged cross arm which officers replaced within three hours.
A short email response to queries by The National read: “Few other outages caused by system failures which were fixed and restored. Most of our outages comes from Transmission outages (514 Transmission Line between Kundiawa and Kudjip.”