Endesa has received in just 36 hours a hundred telephone calls managed through the breakdown telephone service center (CAT) and the registration of the website itself, requesting the urgent intervention of the company's operators due to electrical incidents caused by the strong gusts of wind associated with the Celia storm. In Lanzarote, the municipality of Haría has been the one that has registered the most incidents between Monday and Tuesday, as reported by the company.
Along with Haría, the most affected areas of the Canary Islands have been Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, as well as Arafo, Tuineje, El Rosario, the south of Gran Canaria and several actions in Fuerteventura and La Palma. During the morning of this Tuesday, there were still detachments of cables and other incidents that required the intervention of the Endesa operator team, through its subsidiary e-Distribution.
The electricity company points out that in other cases "insulators, contacts between electricity conductors, as well as blown fuses, were damaged due to objects that raise the flight moved by the wind such as plastics, tarpaulins, awnings, etc.". They also explain that normally, these materials "touch the lines and cause the incident."
From Endesa they point out that the majority of the calls came from citizens and from the mayors and councilors of the different municipalities of the Canary Islands, alerting about "the detachment of cables on public roads and electrical poles that fell dangerously to the ground, affecting road traffic in certain cases." In addition, the company counts the occasional fall of several metal towers, the most striking of which were located in the municipalities of Moya and Candelaria. The elevated electrical structures were literally bent by the force of the wind until they fell to the ground. From Endesa they remember that the wind reached at some moments "gusts of up to 150 kilometers per hour."
The director of the Distribution area in the Canary Islands, Carlos Lafoz, insisted on "the intense work to which the department has been subjected in recent hours", as a result of the multiple falls of electrical elements on public roads, some of them "even endangering the integrity of people."
“Fortunately, there have been no personal injuries, but it is true that the storm has caused many electrical damages such as the fall of cables and several support points that were completely bent. Clarify that in some cases we have acted immediately, but in others we will attend to the repairs as the weather conditions improve, since we also have to guarantee the safety of our operators”, Lafoz points out.
