The Tribune

By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

A POWER trip at the Clifton Station caused yesterday’s island wide blackout, BEC Chairman Leslie Miller said yesterday.

Speaking with The Tribune, Mr Miller said a preliminary investigation has shown that when the power output was transferred to the Blue Hill sub-station, that facility could not take the load, resulting in a power trip and the island-wide blackout.

According to a statement from BEC, the outage, which affected BEC’s generation, transmission, and distribution networks on the island, occurred at about 8:30 am Monday.

While the cause is still being investigated, BEC officials say that teams were immediately dispersed in the Corporation’s effort to quickly restore supply. BEC began restoring supply to customers at 9:03am on Monday and this process steadily progressed until full restoration was achieved around 11:30 am. The Corporation offered “its sincerest apology to those customers who were impacted by the outage, but assures them that it is carrying out investigations to prevent the likelihood of future incidents of supply interruption,” the release said.

President of the Bahamas Electrical Workers Union, Stephano Greene dismissed rumours that the union played a part in the outage, in fact, he said, his members worked diligently to restore the power.

“That was not the union. From what I hear there was a fault at the power stations that caused the generator to trip, we did not do anything, yet,” he said.

“We have not reached the point where we have to take action. We are being a mature union and following what is outlined in our agreement. But I can tell you if we are not satisfied, in the not too distant future, we will take action. Our members are on alert.”

The union and Mr Miller have been at odds since BEC Executive Chairman Leslie Miller accused the union of “double dipping” on National Insurance benefits.

Last week, Mr Miller issued a memo telling staff they will no longer be allowed to collect NIB monies for certain benefits, such as sick benefit, while still being paid by BEC.

He said beginning November 1, BEC employees will no longer be allowed to “double dip” by collecting both NIB and their full salary.