As Bahamians, we have come to sadly accept several unacceptable things when it comes to service delivery from the state. We accept that Bahamasair will always lose money and that taxpayers should fund it; we also accept that the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) cannot keep the lights on.
Over the past few days there have been numerous outages on the island of New Providence. In eastern New Providence there was an outage Sunday night and an outage yesterday morning.
BEC said there were also outages last Wednesday and last Friday on the island. These are the declared outages. On numerous other occasions Bahamians have arrived home at night from work to see the digital displays on their appliances blinking, needing to be reset, because the power went off while they were away.
Explaining the recent declared outages, BEC said yesterday that “unforeseen equipment failures” caused its generators to trip and go off-line at a time when one of the corporation’s largest generating units was out of service for upgrades.
“The generator trips resulted in our inability to maintain a consistent supply of electricity to meet demand at the time. As a result, some customers would have experienced periods of electricity supply disruption,” said BEC in its statement.
“In each instance, when there was equipment failure, the hardworking men and women of the corporation worked diligently to take corrective action. One of the generators that malfunctioned on Sunday has already returned to service, bringing relief to customers who may have experienced brief periods of service interruption on Monday.
“Additionally, the generator that faulted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 was returned to service on Monday. Provided there are no other challenges, we will be able to meet New Providence’s demand at this time.”
That all sounds good, but we all know the power will soon begin to go out regularly in the near future. Summer is soon upon us and BEC does not have the capacity to handle the increased demand during this season as Bahamians cool their homes and businesses.
