Businesses and residents can expect more short power losses like the one on August 30 as Belco works to replace the sophisticated switch lost in a major fire in July.

Belco president and chief executive officer, Garry A. Madeiros said yesterday that if a fully functional switch had been operating, the anomaly would never have been noted by the utility?s customers.

Parts of the Island were without power for up to an hour-and a half on August 30, as engineers ?dropped loads? to outlying areas to protect power supply to Hamilton.

?In order to protect the supply to the City, where necessary, we will drop load in outlying residential areas. Normally, we can expect that power will be restored to residential areas within one to two hours, or less,? Mr. Madeiros said.

He also explained what progress had been made in the plant since the fire, including a five stage restoration process, of which they had completed four stages.

?We are in the process of preparing for phase five of the restoration which is the installation of a temporary switchboard facility by November 30. As you probably remember, on Tuesday August 30, a transmission system fault caused a dip in voltage that was noticeable throughout the Island,? Mr. Madeiros wrote in a release.

?The high voltage underground fault caused automatic protections to operate and shutdown three engines. Approximately 25 circuits were affected and 2000 customers, outside the City of Hamilton, lost power for up to an hour-and-a-half.?

?Over the next several months, we will endeavour to keep you updated on our plant status, as well as findings related to the cause of the fire, and progress on the long-term solution we are working on which will bring on line the three engines still stranded and will rebuild flexibility into our system.

?Under normal circumstances, before the fire, our system would have been able to automatically recover from such a fault without power interruption and you would not have even known there was a fault,? he said. ?However, since the fire, the temporary reconfigured system we put in place to restore power does not have the flexibility or responsiveness of the previous system.

?Therefore, what were previously minor events on our system now could have a more significant impact,? he said.

The old switch board room which was devastated by the blaze is being replaced in the same place.