The Tribune

BY SANCHESKA DORSETT

Tribune Staff Reporter

sdorsett@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Power and Light has resumed disconnections of past due accounts, Corporate Communications Manager Arnette Ingraham confirmed yesterday.

However, Mrs Ingraham said the company is only “disconnecting accounts with outstanding balances prior to Hurricane Matthew.”

She said customers with an overdue balance from August’s billing period or prior “are subject to our usual disconnection practice”.

Last month, BPL temporarily suspended disconnections on overdue accounts in an effort to provide relief to customers after the passage of Hurricane Matthew, which devastated parts of the country in early October.

At the time, the company also encouraged customers to “pay their bills by the due date” to avoid an interruption in supply when disconnection activities resume.

Mrs Ingraham told The Tribune that BPL extended the payment deadline for that billing cycle to give customers “more time to pay.”

Yesterday, she said going forward customers have 45 days to pay their bill for September’s consumption.

“For most people these bills will be due the last week in November or the first week in December. We have also started billing for October’s consumption. We expect that these bills will be lower depending on how many days the customer was without service during and after Hurricane Matthew,” Mrs Ingraham said.

“To reiterate, we are only disconnecting accounts with outstanding balances from August’s billing period or prior. BPL has given its customers as much reprieve as it possibly can. As a result of the storm, we suspended disconnections for approximately six weeks beginning the first week of October (prior to the storm). We continue to encourage our customers who have difficulty paying to visit any of our customer service centres in New Providence or the Family Islands so that we can discuss affordable payment arrangement terms that will allow them to maintain their service, especially during this very difficult period.”

Several irate BPL customers complained that despite not having electricity for a prolonged period after the passage of Hurricane Matthew, their electricity bills have “increased” for this month.

Mrs Ingraham said the last bill would have been an estimate “using the average consumption” because employees were not able to read meters during the first few days of October, as is customary, because of the passage of Matthew.

The difference of the consumption, whether higher or lower, would be reflected in Octobers bill, after the meters would have been read.

“We estimated the bills because we could not read meters as a result of the storm. For most people those bills were lower than their traditional September bill; however, for some it may have been higher as we used the account’s lifetime average to estimate,” she said.