Trying to paint a positive picture of Tuesday’s island-wide power outage, Trade Minister Chan Chun Sing twisted his words saying that the incident means everything is working fine:
“Preliminary investigations following this week’s power outages across multiple estates in Singapore suggest that the country’s backup procedures are in place and working fine.”
The former army general then openly lied that power was restored by 15 minutes, when supply only returned some 38 minutes later:
“When the first system failed, our backup system kicked in immediately and even when that failed, we had sufficient capacity to restart after 15 minutes. That was what happened and hence within 38 minutes, we were able to fully restore power to the system…I’ll like to assure Singaporeans that we have sufficient capacity in our system and this is what we have demonstrated that night.”
There has been no official explanation to the cause of the blackout, with the government saying it was “only a power trip”. According to the government, a “power trip” at two power generators by Temasek Holdings-owned company, SembCorp, and Japanese-owned Senoko Energy caused the half-hour-long blackout.
Minister Chan Chun Sing was quick to defend the government-owned power supplier, stating that it is “too premature” to be discussing about penalties:
“It is too premature to talk about penalties for the companies involved.”