NEWS & UPDATES
Sejingkat Substation Vandalised, Transformer Ransacked For Copper
KUCHING, 16TH JUNE 2017, FRIDAY: Sarawak Energy seeks assistance from members of the public to immediately call its Customer Care Centre at 1300-88-3111 or make a report through its mobile app “SEB cares” when experiencing outage or witnessing suspicious looking people near its electrical facilities. The fast action to report will minimise the duration of the outage and in the case of vandalism, could lead to the arrest of the thieves.
Another vandalism case targeting Sarawak Energy’s electrical facilities happened on Wednesday at Sejingkat Substation where a 1000kVA transformer in the brick wall sub was ransacked and stripped off its content. Copper parts of the transformer were stolen incurring a loss of about RM30,000 to replace the badly damaged transformer.
“We received the report from a customer only at 11.01am. When our technical team reached the substation at 11.32am, the thieves were long gone. After checking with the customer, we found out that supply was actually disrupted at around 2am in the morning. If we were informed earlier, we could have caught the thieves red handed. However, our team managed to replace the transformer and restore supply to the affected customers at 6.40pm on the same day,” said Sarawak Energy’s Regional Manager, Mr. Choo Min Chong ( 朱民章).
Sarawak Energy has increased the patrols and managed to foil a number of attempted vandalism with assistance from the police. The highest number of vandalism cases on electrical facilities is recorded in Bintulu with 13 cases in the recent two months.
“We will continue to work closely with the police to curb this dangerous crime. Public safety is Sarawak Energy’s utmost priority. We will continue to stress how dangerous this criminal activity can be. The thieves persist in risking their lives by breaking into our substations and stealing parts of our high voltage equipment. In addition to causing equipment failure, power outages and electrocution, copper theft can also cause unstable voltage, damaging customers' electrical appliances,” added Choo.
Since 2015, there have been about 430 cases of copper theft targeted at Sarawak Energy’s electrical facilities. The company has incurred more than RM 5.2million to replace stolen and damaged equipment in the last two years.
While efforts have been stepped up in terms of security and monitoring, SESCO continues to seek the cooperation of members of the public to report incidents of copper theft or suspicious activities around its facilities.
Other than our 24-hour call centre reports can also be logged into Sarawak Energy’s “SEB Cares” Mobile App, available for download at Apple’s App Store for iOS and Google’s Play.
