Power cut fury: Businesses and residents angry over long outages

By Desiree Joseph

Grand Bahama was plunged into complete darkness last night as reports came in of power cuts right across the island.

It was the second outage of the day.

The first being in the morning when electricity went off for at least two hours.

Last night the power went out again, this time about 6:30 and the problem had still not been fixed as The Freeport News went to press.

The outages come despite two new generators being brought on line by the Grand Bahama Power Company (GBPC).

And with business owners and residents already complaining about the high cost of their fuel bills.

Last night the cause of the outage was a mystery to power chiefs.

GBPC Corporate Communications Executive Philcher Farquharson-Grant told The Freeport News just before 9:00 p.m. that several customers, including Bahamia and Bahama Terrace, were back on and work crews were working to resolve the problem.

"We have some customers back on and we're putting in all of those other feeders one by one now," she said.

It was expected that the remainder of the customers would have been back on in another two hours.

Yesterday, business owners and residents were ringing The Freeport News to complain about the power cuts.

One businessman explained that the outages were not only inconvenient but "messing up his equipment and causing him to lose money."

Grant admitted that the power outage, which occurred on Wednesday, was due to a fire on one of their poles.

"The outage we experienced earlier today was due to a fire disturbance on one of the poles and that lasted for only 15 minutes," she said.

One of the key concerns reportedly brought up at a recent Rotary meeting was the $80 million generator that the GBPC announced should be coming on stream soon and the fact that it should eliminate such problems.

Farquharson noted that none of the power outages/surges which occurred on Wednesday or as of yesterday were due to generation problems.

She explained that some of them were scheduled to take place such as the two-hour one that occurred out East End on Thursday and generation short-pull was not the blame.

The power was also affected in some areas due to the inclement weather.

An angry resident who lives out east phoned in to voice his disgust.

"Our electricity has been off twice today, once this morning for two hours and again tonight," he said.

"Just recently, the power company was praising the fact that two new generators had come on line. What is going on?

"We pay a lot of money for a service which is really in total shambles."

The power company did advise that all scheduled outages are posted up on their official website and announced on local radio stations beforehand.

© 2012 The Freeport News