The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) says that the severing of its marine cable across the Demerara River in November last year cost $201m and it has now introduced a virtual aid to protect its infrastructure.
In a notice on its website, GPL said that in addition to the cost the incident took five international and local contracting companies along with the utility’s staff four weeks to repair. As a result, the company decided to implement a new active warning system to vessels.
GPL said that on Friday July 9th, it activated a Virtual Aid-to-Navigation (AtoN) beacon that constantly transmits the location of two of the cables on radio frequencies used by ships’ Automatic Identification System (AIS).