The Tribune

By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Tribune Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Power and Light customers have been plagued by frequent power cuts this month, affecting students who are using virtual learning platforms and some small businesses struggling to survive because of COVID-19.

By The Tribune’s count, there have been more than a dozen outages - including an island-wide blackout and other widespread cuts over the past three weeks since September 1.

These service disruptions continued yesterday affecting customers in Winton, East Street South, Ernest Street, Sea Breeze, Imperial Park, Blue Hill South and North, areas south of Soldier Road and University Drive.

According to BPL, a lightning strike due to inclement weather yesterday sparked the outage.

Angry customers voiced their frustration on BPL’s Facebook page.

One mother commented: “Great, my child can’t finish her afternoon class.”

“What’s going on, virtual class was going on y’all (sic) need to get it together,” another parent said.

“So, you have students depending on electricity and internet for classes and national exams but have the power off in the middle of the day? Get it together please,” another person complained.

One small business owner who did not want to be named said the frequent power cuts have placed a strain on her already struggling business.

“You know this is already a challenging time for everyone, especially small business owners,” the baker told The Tribune yesterday. “With the pandemic we have had to fight to continue on. I’ve reopened, but if I can’t continue because the lights are off and on frequently, how am I expected to make a living for myself?

“We pay our bills and can’t get consistent service? I would say it’s ridiculous.”

Last week, the company advised that certain areas would be without power for three-hour intervals due to planned outages.

These areas - Hurricane Hole, Paradise Island, Blackbeard Terrace along with Expulses and the immediate Cable Beach area – experienced power outages on September 15, 16 and 17 respectively.

And then on September 13, a widespread outage hit New Providence. Areas affected included: East Street South and southern New Providence, commercial areas on Thompson Boulevard, Blue Hill Road - North and South, Musha Hill (Ridgeland Park), portions of Seabreeze and Abundant Life Road, Mackey Street as far as Madeira Street, and the Twynam area.

It happened as teams were working at the Clifton Pier Power Station to return one of the major generation units to service following maintenance and repairs.

At the time BPL said as these works were progressing, a transformer at CPPS connecting to Station A tripped offline, which led to the disconnection of three engines from the grid.

This, in turn, led to a widespread outage. Teams worked assiduously to address the issue, and by 9.39pm were able to resolve the issue such that all customers affected by the outage had their power restored, BPL said.

Two days before on September 11, an island-wide outage occurred. BPL said at around 1.16pm, the system experienced a problem that caused the six engines online at Station A to come offline all at once.

The mitigation systems were unable to deal with the sudden, unexpected loss of half the generation on the grid, which led to an island-wide outage.

Several other service disruptions happened in the days prior back to September 1.

BPL did not respond to The Tribune’s inquiries yesterday up to press time.