The Transmission Company of Nigeria, upon restoring power to Birnin Kebbi and Sokoto after a devastating fire outbreak damaged two transformers on Thursday night, chartered a loss of $4 million.
The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of TCN, Dr. Sule AbdulAzeez, expressed his dismay over the magnitude of the damage while addressing reporters in Birnin Kebbi after inspecting the affected facilities.
He received a distressing phone call on Thursday night about the fire incident and was in communication throughout the night until the fire was finally extinguished on Friday morning at around 7 a.m.
AbdulAzeez assured the public that a committee of professionals and specialists would be formed to investigate the root cause of the incident.
However, the immediate focus was on restoring power to Kebbi and neighboring states.
He explained, “This station is also serving Sokoto not only Kebbi. So, the first thing we are going to do is to back feed Sokoto through Talatan Mafara in Zamfara State.”
“Here in Kebbi also, very quickly, we have already mobilized our engineers, in fact; they have already started opening the cable trenches.”
The TCN boss mentioned that they had a transformer that previously supplied power to Niger Republic, which could now be used to expedite the restoration of power to Kebbi.
AbdulAzeez acknowledged that achieving a permanent solution would take approximately two weeks due to the arrangement of transformers and other necessary components.
However, he noted that the possibility of temporarily providing power from Sokoto to Kebbi could be realized in two or three days.
He appealed to customers for patience, emphasizing that the incident had occurred unexpectedly but assured them that TCN was diligently working to resolve the problem.
He affirmed that the situation was “under control” and that a comprehensive assessment of the affected transformers would be conducted to facilitate repair work.
