Sri Lanka’s state-owned electricity producer and supplier has set up a committee to probe whether a “scuffle” between monkeys led to a nationwide power blackout this week, local newspaper the Daily Mirror reported.
The South Asian island went into a complete blackout early Sunday morning, following which its Power and Energy Ministry said “a group of monkeys” had entered a power station south of Colombo. During a scuffle between the monkeys, one of them hit “the transmission line leading to an immediate imbalance in the power grid,” authorities said.
The explanation led Sri Lankans to respond with anger and ridicule, with a lobby of small industrialists demanding compensation for the damages they incurred during the outage.
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Chief power supplier the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is now forming a committee to probe whether the blackout was actually caused by fighting monkeys.
An official from the company said it had made several requests to improve the capacity and infrastructure of the national power grid but has had no success. Sri Lanka has been battling an economic crisis since 2019.
In a separate report the Daily Mirror also said that Sri Lanka currently uses a large amount of solar power, but those plants are not connected to the main national grid. It would explain how a monkey hitting one transmission line would cause an imbalance in the power grid, it said.
Separately, in an opinion piece, the newspaper slammed the island’s government for a lack of transparency. “The new demon facing us Lankans in the era of President AK Dissanayake seems to be the monkey. Just a short month ago, we learned that monkeys were the cause of a shortfall in coconut production. Now we have a monkey blacking out the entire country in a matter of minutes,” the paper said.
“The long and short of this latest monkey business is that this government too, like all its predecessors is not telling us the truth,” it went on to add.
Meanwhile, as for the fate of the monkey being held responsible for the island’s blackout, the Daily Mirror said it was found dead near the affected transmission line on Monday.
Read the full report: Daily Mirror
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