The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A Chamber director has called on Bahamas Power & Light to “get it together” over power outages after the latest blackout affecting the eastern part of New Providence.

Debbie Deal, the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce director for energy and the environment, told Tribune Business: “These power outages seem to be happening in the same areas over and over again. I think BPL had to admit that yes, there are certain areas that they do need to replace transformers and they do need to do some replacing.”

Ms Deal added: “On Wednesday night there was no storm, not even a hint of wind and just before 9pm the power went off and didn’t come back on until about 7:20am yesterday morning.”

BPL has a Whatsapp community group that Ms Deal is a part of and she said she posted in the group to enquire about the reason behind the power outage in her area and she said she has not gotten a response from BPL, “I do not understand that. If you are going to have a group like this then for the love of God please respond to the people. We need to know what is going on,” Ms Deal said.

Ms Deal was left wondering if it was a traffic accident that created the blackout or if BPL was struck by lightning or any litany of issues from faulty BPL equipment.

Ms Deal added: “Bahamian people can deal with almost anything if we know what is going on, but if we are left in the dark and we have to assume for ourselves we are not going to assume in a positive fashion.

“Our energy company has to get it together and customer service has to be key if you want the rest of us in this country to actually join forces with you and say okay, we know your situation, how can we help? My way of helping is to teach and show us all through the videos that we have and other videos that people have on how to reduce your energy consumption, so that you use less so that BPL can actually provide better, more reliable and safe power to us.”

Ms Deal also focused on collection of overdue payments, saying: “Everybody is moaning and groaning about BPL disconnecting consumers, which we should, but you are cutting off power to people who don’t have the money to pay you and if these were people that have paid you constantly then that’s fine and if these were people that were way over before the virus these weren’t people that were going to pay you anyway. I don’t know if they have gone to the people that owe the bigger bills that they have outstanding and try to collect on those, but I think that is one good reason to have a foreign entity in there doing the collecting because they don’t know anybody and they are not related to anybody.”

Ms Deal said they are advocating to have BPL privatised and to have cabinet taken out of the decision making of BPL, because every time BPL gets into trouble the cabinet bails the company out and with this arrangement BPL will never learn to be efficient.