The Tribune

By LETRE SWEETING

AMID complaints from some residents in western New Providence this week about recent continued power outages, Shevonn Cambridge, Bahamas Power and Light chief executive officer said power cuts were not intentional or caused by BPL.

“We weren’t really aware of any major outage in Westridge,” Mr Cambridge said. “I know we’re not perfect, but we’re not as bad as people make us out to be. We try to make the customer experience as pleasant as possible.”

This weekend residents in the areas of Sandyport, Westridge and West Bay Street reportedly started experiencing intermittent power outages that have lasted several days. Mr Cambridge said that Bahamas Power and Light is often trying to correct problems that have or may occur but almost never are the cause of the outages themselves.

“So oftentimes when people feel, ‘oh the power going off, the power going off’, it’s us reconfiguring the system to mitigate against having a bunch of customers off. We would do switching to try and minimise the amount of people who are affected by the outage or the area that we need to isolate to do the repair,” he said.

Mr Cambridge said that in one particular area, BPL tried to mitigate the effect on a large number of customers by switching the load around, he said.

“We had one area, a particular condominium complex had a transformer issue. And in the troubleshooting of that there would have been one or two outages, first in the initial troubleshooting as well as they then would isolate the area. In order to isolate that area to do the work we tried to backfeed as many customers as possible. So, that oftentimes requires switching the load around on the system,” he said.

Mr Cambridge added: “It’s not a continuing to happen thing, but as the incidents occur, we do what we have to to try and minimise the amount of customers impacted by any issues on the system.

“In some instances we don’t have the isolation points to narrow it down to a small area so you may find a large amount of customers will be off until such a time as we were able to correct the problem. But it’s not everything that’s wrong. Some of it is just general routine operational stuff, which may require you being disrupted a little more than you’re used to. But it’s all done with the intent of minimising the impact on customers.”

He said that continued power outages in the affected areas are not expected.

“There’s nothing planned for that area that I know of, but what you will find is densely populated or congested areas are more prone to having issues just mainly, because there are are individual supplies connected in those areas there are more transformers and switched in those areas and there’s more traffic traversing those areas. And even to a certain extent, a lot more construction activity, other things or third party activities may impact our system and what’s going on in those areas,” Mr Cambridge said.