Residents of Kenya were without power for 3 hours yesterday after a monkey fell on a transformer at a power station. This is according to the country's electricity company KenGen which released a statement to that effect. The statement reads:
"At 1129 hours this morning, a monkey climbed on the roof of Gitaru Power Station and dropped onto the transformer tripping it.
This caused other machines at the power station to trip on overload resulting in a loss of more than 180MW form this plant, which triggered a national power blackout. "The system has since been restored and all our power generating units are operating normally. "KenGen power installations are secured by electric fencing which keeps away marauding wild animals. "We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants." The affected power station is the country's largest in terms of installed capacity. According to local media, the outage saw the service industry, which relies on the mains supply, grind to a halt. Power was restored across the country at around 3pm local time.
