Yesterday’s sudden storm was not the only incident to dampen this year’s Ħamrun feast celebrations as a cable fault on Friday night left hundreds of enthusiasts fuming in the dark.

This was the second consecutive power cut in the locality within a week, following a widespread cut on Thursday.

Thursday’s power up in a number of localities was caused by an unplanned disruption of the Malta-Italy interconnector.

Enemalta and its partners in Italy were still investigating this incident but the company said it could not confirm the cause until the analysis had been concluded.

The power interruptions proved a headache for feast enthusiasts, as other power cuts were reported during the St Peter’s feast celebrations in Birżebbuġa, Our Lady of Pompeii in Marsaxlokk, and Lija, which was celebrating the Christ Our Saviour feast.

Natural cable faults that affected the network flexibility

When contacted, Enemalta said the outage at the Birżebbuġa seafront on August 1 was caused by a fault in the substation supplying that area.

The disruptions at Marsaxlokk on Sunday at 4.15pm and at Ħamrun on Friday at 11.30pm were caused by “natural cable faults that affected the network flexibility to provide the required services in these areas”.

At Marsaxlokk, power was restored by 5.25pm, while residents in Ħamrun were fully reconnected by 3.10am. The spokesman noted that in each case, Enemalta immediately dispatched emergency teams to restore electricity. Last month, the company allocated additional teams on standby to respond to network faults.

Enemalta said it was working on a number of projects to reinforce the power network and reduce the risk to problems. These include the development of new distribution centres in different parts of the country, upgrading existing centres and laying additional cable connections.