Tacugama

Category: Tacugama | Date: Jun 24 2009 | By: tacugama

It never rains but it pours… Now the rainy season has started to make a big impact – and not just with the water… yesterday afternoon a huge electrical storm passed over the sanctuary and we were hit by lightning. As storms are common in Sierra Leone’s rainy season all of our electric fencing that surrounds the enclosures is protected with lightening conductors but yesterday’s strike produced much more power than even they could dissipate.

As we rushed to check our monitoring equipment and the fences we discovered that the strike had caused significant damage to our installations. Much of yesterday was spent painstakingly tracking cabling and switches to see how bad the damage was.

Bala and Pastor checking for damage
.

We’ve been incredibly lucky that none of our staff or chimps were hurt by the strike, though Willie and our new volunteer Tess, who were in the office at the time, received mild shocks. That’s about where the luck ends…

The list of damaged equipment includes battery energisers, cut-out switches, alarm monitors and the lightening arrestors. The cost of repairs and replacements will get close to US$3000 and most will have to be sourced overseas. We’re busy making emergency repairs and making sure that the chimps can safely continue using the forested enclosures.

Moses monitors the power to the electric fences as Urgent, Salva and Jetti look on
.

We would like to ask you for your help please; whatever you can do to help us with the costs of repairing the electrical equipment would be much appreciated. It’s not easy to plan for this kind of event and we appreciate your support.

We really hope that in our next blog we will be back to giving you some positive news and stories about the chimps - thanks for all your support and sympathy for Mark and Cheetah. Your comments really help.

Tags: Chimpanzee, Sierra Leone, Tacugama