Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

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COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka extended power cuts for a third day on Thursday as it scrambled to restore its national grid to full capacity after a monkey triggered a widespread blackout over the weekend that disrupted supply to the island’s 22 million people.

An outage lasting six hours on Sunday was blamed by power minister, Kumara Jayakody, on a monkey that disrupted a grid station in a Colombo suburb. No power cuts were implemented on Wednesday, which was a holiday in Sri Lanka.

The animal had come into contact with the transformer at the station, disrupting supply to the entire country. There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.

One-hour power cuts will be implemented from 6 p.m. (1230 GMT), the island’s state-run power monopoly, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), said in a statement.

Sunday’s disruption also affected the island’s only 900 MW coal fired power plant, causing it to operate in safe mode, the CEB said.

“All efforts are being made to restore the grid to full capacity but power cuts will be implemented to manage peak demand hours in the night,” the CEB statement added.

Ninety-minute power cuts were implemented on Monday and Tuesday to manage demand. An investigation into the outage was being conducted by the energy ministry.

(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; Editing by YP Rajesh and Bernadette Baum)