If you live in Diego Martin, Laventille, East Port of Spain, North Trinidad along the Eastern Main Road, in a high-crime part of Chaguanas or San Fernando or at Mt Hope and environs, it is not a good time for your electricity to be cut off.

Peter Burke, vice president of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU), the union representing workers at the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC), has said the company has adopted a new policy where workers would not be coming into these areas to work, even in daylight, unless accompanied by police officers.

While Burke said it can be argued that everywhere in Trinidad and Tobago is now a high crime area, these spots were the ones to which they will be holding this policy in a hard and fast manner.

Though an unofficial version of this policy was being applied for some areas of the country since last year, as the company’s employees were being attacked while performing duties since then , Burke said this new, more established policy comes following a recent attack when an employee who was reading a meter in the Mt Hope area was robbed by bandits and shot in the stomach.

’Seeing him in hospital solidified the need for us to seek the security of workers,’ Burke said, adding that the employee has lost one kidney, his gall bladder and part of his liver due to injuries sustained in the attack.

He also said over 1,000 T&TEC employees perform duties where they have to go into communities and sometimes interact with residents but added if they cannot feel ’secure and confident’ that they will not be attacked when they come to repair a line or read a meter, then they will not come without protection from the national police.

He said workers have been expressing fear since last year, and Wednesday’s attack has concretised the fact that their concerns are real and that both the police and T&TEC’s management must take heed of the employees’ concerns.