It was a strong will of President Daniel Gibbs and his team: to use the mandate to bury electricity and fiber optic networks, for better resilience in the event of a natural disaster.
Since the beginning of 2018, in the aftermath of Cyclone Irma, EDF has launched the major project to completely bury its networks in Saint-Martin. The climatic experiences of the past had already prompted the national company to gradually bury two thirds of its networks on our island, or 150 km - for 12 customers - and the work launched after Irma concerned the remaining 000 km of aerial networks, to the other 100 customers. 6 km having already been buried since the start of the reconstruction, there are therefore only 000 km of cables left to be buried. This major project will be completed towards the end of the first half of next year, in accordance with the initial schedule, as confirmed by Laurent Veguer, in charge of the network reconstruction mission in the Northern Islands for EDF Archipel Guadeloupe. Cost of the operation: 80 million for Saint-Martin, financed by the Collectivity through the Community Assistance Fund for Rural Electrification (FACÉ) and by EDF.
18 connected customers to the underground network
Concretely, it is first necessary to dig a trench and deposit the electric cables there, reseal, then energize the cables and make the connections, one by one, street by street, subscriber by subscriber, passing from the overhead network to the new network. buried. As long as the last of the 18 customers of Saint-Martin will not benefit from this installation, it will be necessary to keep the overhead network and its numerous electricity poles, which will almost entirely disappear in 000, except in the case where they support other networks such as public lighting or telecoms. This painstaking work, which took more than three years, will make it possible to limit as much as possible the damage linked to the passage of cyclonic phenomena. Burying does not guarantee invulnerability, damage can always occur on individual boxes or on neighborhood stations, but the networks themselves will be preserved and any repairs will be simpler and therefore faster. And if the hurricane phenomenon is not too bad, we might not even experience a power outage!
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