The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

WHEN Bahamas Power & Light couldn’t keep its power on in August, seamstress Raquel Beneby had a choice: temporarily relocate to New Providence to complete school uniforms for her customers or buy a generator and finish the work in Andros.

She chose the latter and has regretted the decision ever since.

“The money I spent maintaining that generator ate up all of my little profit,” she said yesterday. “Maintaining that generator hurt me more than if I had picked up my uniforms, my machinery and went to Nassau.”

Family Island residents like Ms Beneby are familiar with inconveniences, but the power woes in North Andros are forcing some of them to contemplate life-changing decisions.

 Residents there say problems have persisted since a fire destroyed all units at a BPL station in July.

 Now, the electricity goes out randomly and without announcement, often for five or six hours, sometimes all night.

 Randy Butler, the former SkyBahamas CEO who lives on the island, said the outages affect what people elsewhere take for granted, like the availability of ice cream in stores.

 “You can’t find that in most places in Andros because they’re not going to store it,” he said yesterday. “If you go with medicine that needs to be in the fridge, the doctors are trying to find some alternatives.” 

 Darin Bethel, president of the North Andros Chamber of Commerce, said power was especially unreliable over the weekend.

 “We get the mail boat once per week,” he said. “That’s how we buy most of our perishables, and with not having the consistent or reliable power services to maintain and support those perishables, business owners are reducing their amount of perishables.”

 BPL yesterday acknowledged “intermittent challenges” in North Andros.

 “In most cases, when issues arise, the team has been able to resolve them fairly quickly,” the company said in a statement to The Tribune. “Over the weekend, most of the challenges were actually experienced on our transmission lines. The faults took some time to locate and repair. For the most part, generation has stabilized, but we still have work to do to reduce generator downtime and provide uninterrupted supply.” 

 Ms Beneby, 55, has been a seamstress for 32 years.

 She visited New Providence earlier this summer.

 “It was so bad, at one point I considered not going back to Andros because of the outages,” she said.

 Ultimately, she returned to Andros to avoid the hassle of sending crates of supplies to another island and having to find accommodations.

 “I was very, very sorry I did that,” she said.

 She said she usually completes uniforms within the first week of the school term. This year, she was delayed by three weeks.

 “I don’t know what’s going on all over here, ma’am, but it has me lost for words,” she said, calling the failure to complete her job on time “very, very hurtful.”

 “Frustration have me can’t even speak to you clearly where it’s that bad.”