The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) has vehemently denied the statement made by the chairman of Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL) that it had accepted the blame for the major power outage on December 09.

Dismissing the statement as ‘incorrect’, the state-owned electricity supplier noted that investigations into the matter are still in progress. “Statements can be made in this regard following the conclusion of the investigations,” CEB’s media spokesman Eng. Noel Priyantha said in a press release.

Earlier today, the electricity sector regulator’s chairman Prof. Manjula Fernando, citing the CEB, said the state-owned electricity supplier had admitted that it was at fault for the most recent island-wide power failure.

Investigations into the incident are being carried out by two committees, namely the Internal Investigation Committee, chaired by an additional general manager of the CEB, and the External Investigation Committee, appointed by the Power & Energy Ministry.

The internal committee is tasked with studying the main reasons for the power outage, looking into the procedures followed by the CEB officials and employees in respect of the incident, and making recommendations to prevent the recurrence of such failures in the future.

Meanwhile, the external committee, which comprises experts including university lecturers and professors, is tasked with looking into the origin of the incident, conducting investigations on technical issues, reviewing the time window taken to restore the interrupted electricity supply and presenting recommendations and measures to ensure that such incidents do not recur.

On December 09, a sudden major power outage was reported across the country at around 5:10 p.m. and the electricity supply was reported after more than 5 hours. As per initial data, the cause of island-wide power failures was attributed to the breakdown in the transmission line from Kotmale to Biyagama, which the CEB said was a result of lightning strikes.