The Tribune

BY ANNELIA NIXON

TRIBUNE Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

A NEW Providence-wide power outage early Thursday disrupted businesses, delayed flights, affected airport operations and forced Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) into an hours-long restoration effort.

For many businesses, the outage translated directly into lost productivity, delayed appointments and increased operating costs. Emmanuel Petit-Homme, owner and chief executive of FRYME Studios, said the outage effectively crippled his company’s operations.

“It definitely affects our business because we’re in the media business and we need electricity,” he said. “It caused a lot of late starts, and clients already booked and funds already paid. So it caused a lot of inconvenience.”

FRYME Studios rents production facilities and provides advertising, content creation and social media services. Mr Petit-Homme said about 90 percent of the studio’s operations depend on electricity.

“If we don’t have electricity, it literally takes down 90 percent of our studio because you need Wi-Fi speed,” he said. “Our server is down. Our equipment uses electricity to turn on lights and so on and so forth. It’s actually a smart studio also. So if there’s no current, then I guess it’s a dumb studio at that point.”

Mr Petit-Homme said outages create a cascading scheduling problem for clients, many of whom co-ordinate photographers, videographers and make-up artists around fixed appointment times.

“It’s a domino effect,” he said. “If somebody books for today and I have to push them to tomorrow, then the person who was supposed to come tomorrow has to move to the next day.”

To minimise the disruption, the company often provides additional studio time or works late into the evening to accommodate customers, increasing overtime costs while preserving client relationships.

The BPL outage, which began shortly after midnight on Wednesday, left homes, hotels and businesses without electricity for several hours, with BPL later confirming that a fire at its Blue Hills power plant was triggered after a suspected underground cable fault caused an explosion.

Initial investigations later determined that this resulted in the explosion of a 15-mega volt-ampere (MVA) transformer, forcing the utility to isolate critical equipment before beginning to restore the grid.

The outage also disrupted operations at Lynden Pindling International Airport (LPIA). Airport operator, the Nassau Airport Development Company (NAD), said the airport switched to generator power for several hours after commercial electricity failed, with normal power restored shortly after 8am.

Although passenger screening continued, several airlines experienced delays, producing longer-than-normal check-in lines in both the US departures and international/domestic terminals.

“Flights are arriving and departing from LPIA,” NAD said, while encouraging passengers to contact their airlines directly as delays continued to ripple through flight schedules. National flag carrier, Bahamasair, also reported interruptions after the outage affected Internet connectivity used for international passenger check-in.

The airline said back-up Internet systems allowed operations to resume, although passengers travelling on morning flights to Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Orlando experienced minor delays.

Atlantis said it has multiple back-up generators, allowing power to be restored quickly after Thursday’s island-wide failure.

Meanwhile, the Water and Sewerage Corporation advised customers in western New Providence that they could experience temporary interruptions in water service after a generator failure at the Windsor pumping station.

Areas potentially affected included sections of western Carmichael Road, Tropical Gardens, Old Fort, Westridge, Cable Beach West, Munnings Drive and Skyline Drive.