The Tribune

By TANYA SMITH-CARTWRIGHT

tsmith-cartwright@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Electrical Workers Union president has stated that his members are not to blame for any of the supply problems that have hit the power supplier in recent days.

Suspicions that the union may have been behind the outages stems from its recent ultimatum to the company that it had 14 days to resolve outstanding issues.

BEWU president Kyle Wilson told The Tribune that maintenance issues were the cause of the outages – not action by his members.

“The union will not engage in activities that would disenfranchise the Bahamian people at all,” he said. “Under my watch that will not happen. I want to tell the Bahamian people that we are just as responsible as we can be as a union and if it ever comes to that, the Bahamian people will know when the union will disengage its labour.

“I was here over the weekend working on (engine) GD10. We try to do our best to keep the power going. The Bahamian people should never have to be victims of the discourse between management and the union at BPL. That’s our core belief … to never intentionally disenfranchise the Bahamian people.

“We would never engage in such reckless behaviour. I would have spoken to the DPM and Minister of Works, Desmond Bannister and informed him of the issues going on at the plant, so that he himself would be aware of what was happening at the plant.”

Even though many an eyebrow was raised over the weekend in regards to the union possibly trying to make a point with the power cuts, Mr Wilson explained that the trouble lies in the maintenance of the BPL engines and the fact that some are out of service.

“Right now we have a lot of needs at the plants in terms of maintenance,” he said. “So we are trying to do our best to get things going. I am getting conflicting reports of a generator that tripped and a cable that exploded at a sub-station as the cause of the outages. It is being said that there was too much load on the system and it could not handle it.

“I don’t care what they (BPL management says), you cannot tell me it’s okay to be at a loss of almost 100 plus megawatts and then say everything is fine. GD5 is down, GD4 is down, GD8 has complications, GD10 is down and we also have TA11 down. Each one of those represents over 20 megawatts.

“You do the math and tell me if you are missing almost over 100 megawatts if it can be okay. If you are missing a foot or an arm, can you tell me life will still be the same for you? Life cannot be the same for BPL if we have over five major assets down – and that’s just the issues at Blue Hills (plant). You cannot tell me that we are going to be okay.”

Mr Wilson said that some of the engines have been down for more than two years. He said they should have been repaired a long time ago.

The Tribune asked Mr Wilson how negotiations were going with management and the union.

“I feel management is two faced as they play nice in front of the DPM and when we get back to BPL to the table amongst ourselves, they act as ferocious lions ready to eat us,” he said. “They revert to their pitbull mentality, but at the DPM’s office they pretend to be innocent pussycats. They put on a show for the DPM and then come back to BPL and be mean-spirited.

“They keep asking for extensions. We would have given them the extensions they asked for. There are still a lot of direct employee issues that we are still trying to resolve basically from 2018. With the assistance of the DPM and Mrs. Cora Colebrooke, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Works we were able to move some issues. I thank them for getting involved.

“This put the issues back in-house and we left them to continue on a good note. But when we got back in house, management got right back to its position of posturing and arrogance of not respecting the union. So we are right back at square one.”

Mr Wilson said he doesn’t know what will happen in the long run; but, he said, he cannot keep running back to the DPM/Minister of Works to solve matters “if management continues to be disingenuous”.