The Tribune

By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

Eleuthera businesses are planning to seek recovery of losses and damages from Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) as power outages continue to plague the island.

Margarita Hill, proprietor of Royalty’s Sweet Treats, yesterday questioned who she should seek recovery from after an emergency outage impacted Rock Sound, where she conducts business,and multiple other areas.

Ms Hill said bread she had made for customers had already risen and was set to be baked. However, the outages led to a waste of ingredients, cutting into her inventory. With electricity off from 11am to around 3pm, she had to “reschedule” her customers while accusing BPL of not being proactive.

“I was actually making bread,” Ms Hill said. “One was rising, and one I had already loafed to go in the baker. My baker goes with electricity as well. So when the electricity go out, I can’t bake. I can’t do anything. One, I had already loafed off and it was rising, and then I had mixed another batch that was doing the first rise. I had two customers I had those batches for by the end of the day, and that’s like before 5pm now.

“I’ll have to re-accommodate them because once bread rise, you have to bake it. If you don’t bake, it falls and it’s no good. And that’s the big challenge. That’s the issue. To me, they’re not very sympathetic. What’s the emergency? They didn’t say what it was.

“Normally, when BPL say it’s going to be out for that length of time, a lot of times it has to do with the weather. They wouldn’t tell you that. We had a lot of wind, more than usual this morning, and heavy wind was really blowing. I’m assuming it’s because of that. I guess they wanted to make sure that they protect their overhead lines and all that other stuff. And I understand that,” she added.

“One of the challenges we’ve been having here in Eleuthera, specifically South Eleuthera, [is] BPL has not been maintaining their overhead lines. They haven’t been trimming the trees. They haven’t been doing a lot of that stuff. They’re very reactive. They’re not proactive. And that’s one of the challenges we’ve been having here on Eleuthera, specifically. I can speak for the south. They’ve been reactive. It’s like, if you get a real rainstorm, electricity goes out.”

Ms Hill is still awaiting acknowledgement from a BPL employee in the WhatsApp Hotline Group, noting that staff did not respond to her “rant” regarding her “loss”. She added that it was “insulting”.

Ms Hill said BPL often sends outage alerts on short notice, which does not bode well for her line of work.. “The issue is, it’s okay if you let us know that you’re going to turn the electricity off. Whenever they do that, they send the notices out,” she added.

“We make allowances for the fact that we’re going to be off four and five hours. I mean, come on, it’s almost every week. But don’t send a notice out saying you have an emergency outage. The rationale for me was, if it’s an emergency outage, how can you tell me it’s going to be off for five hours? What is an emergency?”