The Tribune

THERE were more than a few sighs of frustration at the weekend, as once again the country was hit by load shedding.

Four years ago, then Deputy Prime Minister Desmond Bannister proclaimed there would be no load shedding.

Wait, remember the year before when we were told there would be one more summer of torment and then it would be happy ever after with BPL having the power generation capacity it needed?

Every summer, it seems like it is 6am again on Groundhog Day and we are waking up to promises that this really honestly will not happen again.

This weekend was a double whammy.

There were water supply problems after a leak forced the Water and Sewerage Corporation to swoop in and shut down a stretch of Prince Charles while they worked to remedy it, and then there was the power outages to go with it.

No water, no power – and a hot weather warning with temperatures that meant people should stay cool and hydrated. Good luck with that.

The cause this time it seems is that BPL was busily preparing for the hot weather when it got caught out by the, well, hot weather.

The demands this weekend were apparently ahead of schedule – the kind of demands seen from July to September, which BPL was busily preparing for by carrying out maintenance on its equipment.

In short, some of the equipment was offline when it was needed, in preparation for when it will be needed most.

Will that mean that we can anticipate that the rest of the summer – once the maintenance is done and everything is screwed back together – will be free of load shedding? Because this explanation won’t wash if we are still short of power in a short couple of months.

The lack of redundancy, as a senior BPL figure puts it, does mean of course that we lack a safety net, with generation levels not much above our demand. One machine unexpectedly offline then creates a problem.

This column has featured BPL’s shortcomings for not just years, but decades.

Are we to believe that this year, finally, absolutely BPL will not let us down?

Or will this be like the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown and promises that this time she absolutely will not pull it away at the last minute, leaving him sailing into the air shouting “Aaugh!”?

Here, BPL is Lucy, the power supply is the football and as for us? We’re Charlie Brown, ready to take another runup.

Auugh.