Embu Governor Cecily Mbarire has dismissed allegations that five babies died during last Friday's nationwide power blackout.
Reports had alleged that the babies died at the Embu Level Five Teaching and Referral Hospital following a power blackout witnessed Saturday.
“I did my investigations and got reports that none of it was true because the hospital has five backup generators and they were all working during the blackout,” Mbarire said during a press conference on Wednesday.
The power outage which lasted for 24 hours in some regions, crippled normal services at various key installations including the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
Mbarire, however, said there were no child fatalities at the referral hospital.
The county boss said on the fateful day, 22 women gave birth at the facility, seven of whom delivered through cesarean section, a process she said could not have been possible without power.
The blackout caused uproar from Kenyans of all walks with activist Boniface Mwangi claiming a father had reached out to him with information that he had lost a child during the outage at the Embu Level 5 Hospital.
Kenya Power attributed the nationwide blackout to a system disturbance at the Lake Turkana Wind Plant (LTWP)
The utility firm said the plant lost 270MW which tripped supply on the national grid leading to an automatic system shutdown as a security measure.
"When there is so much demand, you lose so much. The system was basically securing itself by switching off and sometimes it is better for the system to switch itself off than to burn down," Energy CS Davis Chirchir said on Sunday.
"As we speak today, we have not returned the Lake Turkana Wind Power plant to the grid, we are trying to analyse if there was a problem before we bring them back on," he added.
The CS said the technical team is analysing the matter and by Wednesday, they will have a way forward on what caused the challenge.
However, LTWP distanced itself from the power outage saying they were forced to go offline and stop generation following an overvoltage in the national grid which caused the power plant to go off automatically to avoid extreme damage.
