Gas Customers To Be Compensated For Outage

Island Energy has confirmed that customers will receive compensation after more than 4,000 homes were left without gas for days on end.

Some islanders are still waiting to be reconnected, 13 days after a 'rogue computer code' caused all three control panels at the La Collette plant to shut down.

By lunchtime on Tuesday (18 October), Island Energy said more than 90% had been reconnected and insisted it had 'visited every house'.

Several people contacted Channel 103 to say they were still waiting for an engineer to turn on their supply, and to complain about the lack of information and assistance when calling the firm.

Island Energy CEO Jo Cox told us householders will automatically receive compensation.

"We are in the middle of reviewing all of the domestic customers and we will be getting communication out to say that they are receiving compensation which will automatically applied to their account. 

We are just working through the numbers now as to what that will be."

In the UK customers are entitled to at least £60 for every 24 hours the gas is off.

The outage also affected around 400 businesses, forcing several restaurants and hotels to turn away bookings, with cookers out of action and only cold showers available.

Ms Cox says those customers are being 'treated differently' when it comes to reimbursement:

"For commercial customers, there will be a process that we are going to create, which they will have to complete in order for us to review on a case-by-case basis."

Ms Cox also confirmed to Channel 103 that an investigation into what happened is underway, but it's not known when the final findings will be published.

"We've complete the fix, so we know 100% it was that code that caused the problem.  We have also put in an additional fail-safe so that, if it did for any reason happen again, we've got protection.

We are now waiting for the company responsible for that code to come back to us with their root-cause analysis.

Asked how long that would take, she said:

We are chasing them on a daily basis, believe me. But we are really in their hands because they came and did a service inspection with us on 13 September.

"We need the results of that visit and their full report, so I am expecting that they won't take long to turn it around."

The government has been under pressure from islanders and fellow politicians to get answers to what went wrong.

Ms Cox says she has been touch with Ministers, but tells us she hasn't decided if she will make the investigation report public

"I am perfectly comfortable with continuing to liaise with the government and I have committed that I will go back to them with the findings.

I'm not entirely sure if it is something that should be public, I'll make that decision when I have seen the report."