Beetham residents count losses after 33-hour power outage

Af­ter spend­ing al­most a day and a half (some 33 hours) with­out elec­tric­i­ty, sev­er­al Beetham Gar­dens, Laven­tille, res­i­dents say they are grate­ful pow­er has been re­stored, as they re­called the dif­fi­cul­ties of do­ing their dai­ly rou­tine with­out ac­cess to ap­pli­ances and the loss of hun­dreds of dol­lars in food items.

They al­so ex­pressed mixed views on claims that pow­er to their com­mu­ni­ty was de­lib­er­ate­ly not re­stored in an ef­fi­cient man­ner fol­low­ing a mil­lion-dol­lar fire at the ca­ble yard of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vice of T&T (TSTT) work cen­tre in Laven­tille on Sat­ur­day.

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The al­le­ga­tion was made yes­ter­day in a Face­book post by Laven­tille West MP Ka­reem Mar­celle, who claimed he was told that T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) of­fi­cials were “bat­tling” with a “UNC Min­is­ter” who pur­port­ed­ly sent in­struc­tions not to re­store elec­tric­i­ty to the com­mu­ni­ty.