Shore-to-ship power outage was scheduled test, Transport Malta says

Transport Malta claimed that a power outage on a cruise liner connected to the Grand Harbour’s newly-installed €33 million shore-to-ship electricity system last Wednesday had been part of a planned test, in response to questions about the system's reliability.

“On July 31, during operations with the MSC World Europa, a pre-planned test of new fire detectors was carried out to ensure they were functioning properly,” TM said in a statement issued on Saturday. 

“A contractor had installed these fire detectors as part of the Short-to-Ship system in the Grand Harbour. The test took place 30 minutes before the planned disconnection time. The point of the test was to check that the system would be immediately turned off in case of a fire. The test succeeded as expected. After the alarm was stopped, the system was ready to be reconnected in under a minute. Despite this, the ship chose not to reconnect to the system because it was already due to disconnect soon. The ship’s standby generator had immediately started and started providing electrical power to the ship in less than a minute.”

The statement was issued in reaction to a Facebook post by lawyer and former Nationalist minister Jason Azzopardi on Saturday, in which he shared a message he had received about the outage on the Europa.

The sender questioned why the incident had not featured in local news reports and whether a fault in the newly-inaugurated connector had caused the blackout, which the sender said, had been followed by an onboard announcement blaming the shore-to-ship system and apologising for the inconvenience.