Sri Lanka experienced a country-wide power outage on Sunday and officials blamed the mishap on a monkey.
The incident occurred at a substation in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, reports national news outlet Ada Derana. Kumara Jayakody, the country’s energy minister, told reporters that a monkey came “into contact with a grid transformer,” causing “an imbalance in the system” that knocked out power across the island nation of 22 million people.
The blackout started around 11:30 am local time on Sunday, with restoration efforts focused on bringing medical facilities and water purification plants back online. Many residents were forced to rely on generators as temperatures soared above 30°C.
Officials estimated that it would take a few hours to fully restore power across the country, but the island nation is still struggling to do so days later,
[See more: Melco’s casino-resort in Sri Lanka targets a fully opening in the third quarter]
“Only in Sri Lanka can a group of monkeys fighting inside a power station cause an island-wide power outage,” wrote Jamila Husain, editor-in-chief of local newspaper Daily Mirror. A report from the paper on Monday said engineers have been warning consecutive governments “for years” that the power grid needed to be upgraded or Sri Lanka would face frequent blackouts.
Island-wide power cuts will continue into Tuesday as the Ceylon Electricity Board works to restart the three generators at Sri Lanka’s largest power station, the Norochcholai Coal Power Plant.
Norochcholai is expected to be back online by Friday, one engineer told Ada Derana. He noted that the scheduled outages may be reduced in the coming days as the restoration progresses.
In the meantime, Jayakody, who has only been in the job since last October, has issued a press release blaming past government policies for the power system’s fragility and criticising what he characterised as unplanned and short-sighted energy programmes for contributing to the disruption.
