The Tribune

By ANNELIA NIXON Tribune Business Reporter anixon@tribunemedia.net A convenience store lost 95 percent of its daily sales due to Bahamas Power & Light’s (BPL) day-long Sunday outage while a tourism operator suffered another decline in bookings. Garfield Johnson, proprietor of Amanda’s Convenience Store, said the outage effectively wiped out an entire work day when it began shortly after 10am, forcing him to close around 12.30pm to protect temperature-sensitive inventory. “It was off for 10 hours and we open for 12 hours, so we really couldn’t do anything,” Mr Johnson said. “Nobody was coming. So it was basically a whole day lost. We lost about 95 percent of sales yesterday.” The store, which normally operates from 8am until between 8pm and 9pm, remained closed for the remainder of the day. “After a while, we really couldn’t even keep the doors open because the heat started pouring in,” Mr Johnson said. “If I did not close up while some cool air was still in the shop, I may have lost all my candy bars and the margarines and butter, and all that may have started to melt. “If people had come and the coolers were opening and closing quite frequently, the heat would pour into the coolers. It didn’t make any sense to lose the day’s sales and lose products. You tend to know that you have about 24 hours before the stuff starts to melt. But the chocolates would have gone faster than the cuts.” Mr Johnson said he now factors outages into his annual financial planning. “I still have the inventory, and I’m here today and I try to manage,” he said. “During hurricane months, in my mind, we’re going to lose about seven days of business during June, July, August and September. That’s how I do my finances.” The latest outage also compounded losses for a tourism operator after her business was already affected by a three-hour power interruption on Friday, one day before the US Independence Day holiday. Cheryl Cambridge, owner of Cheryl’s Bahamas Taxi and Tours, said Sunday’s outage forced staff to relocate to a Starbucks so they could access Internet service, while the company’s credit card machine had to remain at the office. “My electricity was off for 11 hours yesterday,” Ms Cambridge said. “The girls went to Starbucks. I give them money because I can’t have them sitting up at a place using free Wi-Fi. So I give them money. They was working out of there. “It was a mess because they can’t use the credit card machine. I don’t want them to take the credit card machine off my premises. So they had a lot of work to do this morning.” Despite those efforts, Ms Cambridge estimated the company still lost about 25 percent of its Sunday business. “I would say about 25 percent because you can’t be answering phones in people place like that,” she said. The latest disruption followed Friday’s outage, which Ms Cambridge previously estimated cost her about 15 percent of July 4 business after her office was unable to respond to last-minute booking requests from American tourists during one of the busiest periods of the year. She said many prospective customers booked with competitors because her staff could not respond to e-mails before power was restored. The repeated outages have intensified frustration among businesses that say they are contending with lost revenue, rising electricity bills and operational disruptions at the height of the summer tourism season. Toni Pratt, BPL’s chief executive, apologised for Sunday’s outage, which she said resulted from an explosion at the utility’s primary substation at the Blue Hills power station following a lightning strike. “We at BPL would like to apologise to all of the residents in New Providence who were impacted by the prolonged outage on Sunday,” Ms Pratt said. “We understand how a prolonged outage could be disruptive to your day-to-day lives, and we are truly sorry for the inconvenience caused.” She said an explosion occurred shortly after 10am in a 33-kilovolt switchgear cabinet that serves as the export point for electricity from the Blue Hills power station to surrounding communities. “When the explosion occurred, it caused damage to the bus bar, which is where the energy is stored before it’s exported,” Ms Pratt said. “We were not able to send any power from the Blue Hills power station at that time until that portion of the bus bar could be isolated.” She added that repairs could only begin after the area was declared safe for crews to enter and assess the damage. “A fault of this magnitude does take an exceptionally long time to restore, which is why the outage was widespread for such a long period of time,” Ms Pratt said. She said customers still experiencing outages should contact BPL because any remaining service interruptions are unrelated to Sunday’s system-wide outage and may require separate repairs.