The Tribune

By FARRAH JOHNSON

Tribune Staff Reporter

fjohnson@tribunemedia.net

THOUSANDS of homes in New Providence were left without power yesterday due to an “engine trip” at one of Bahamas Power and Light’s stations.

The company took to Facebook to notify their customers about the electricity failure and to inform them that a team was working diligently to restore power in the affected areas as soon as possible.

Quincy Parker, BPL’s director of communications, said the outage was caused by a “fault on a transmission line out of Blue Hills Power Station which triggered an outage affecting all customers fed by the station.”

“This affects customers from Gladstone Road headed east,” he said.

“The Clifton Pier Power Station remains online, feeding western New Providence. We have teams en route to Blue Hills at this time to begin restoration, and we estimate that all customers should be restored by about 3pm today. We thank our customers for their patience and apologise for the inconvenience.”

Power was restored in some areas after 3pm and BPL worked throughout the afternoon to complete the restoration process.

Earlier this month, New Providence residents were left without power for hours because of a “mechanical failure” at BPL. The failure caused widespread power supplies to shut down in the eastern, central and western parts of the capital leaving many customers who work from home, due to COVID-19, literally “powerless”.

Over the past few years, BPL has spent millions of dollars on engines to boost up generation so that its customers would not have the inconvenience of power outages or load shedding. Although less frequent, the outages persist.