Statement from Ministry of Culture & Sports

Apologies: Joint Statement from the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport and the Guyana Power and Light Inc. on the Floodlight Failure at Providence National Stadium

The Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport and the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) wishes to inform the public of the loss of three of the six floodlights at the National Stadium during the nineteenth over of the match between Trinidad Knight Riders and the Barbados Royal tonight.

All CPL matches at Providence Stadium, Guyana, were successfully powered from independent Generating Sets located in the National Stadium and not by the GPL grid. GPL has been on standby at all matches to render technical assistance to the Stadium at all times.
During the nineteenth over, three (3) floodlights that were powered by an independent generator lost power, thus causing a disruption to the match. The GPL technical team on standby immediately began rendering assistance and restored power to two of three floodlights on the same circuit.

The Stadium’s Technical staff and GPL worked assiduously to restore power to the third floodlight, which had a technical fault with the underground cable feeding power to that Floodlight, a substitute cable was installed quickly to have this floodlight operational. This was achieved around 10.51 pm.

This is an unprecedented and unfortunate situation as all CPL matches have been successfully hosted at the National Stadium.
The National Stadium offers its sincerest apologies to cricket fans in Guyana and around the World for this match disruption and deeply regrets this technical incident and disruption to this exciting event.

The lights at the Guyana National Stadium going out during an elimination match in one of the world’s top T20 tournaments, with the President of Guyana in the stands, is a national embarrassment.

Why? Because so much is impacted by these delays caused by the lights failing at Providence.

For the record, the custodians of the Guyana National Stadium are fully aware of the ongoing issues with the lights.

These outages occurred during a recent T10 tapeball tournament finals and again during the Warriors’ practice just before the start of the CPL.