A Supreme Court judge has determined that negligence on the part of the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) caused a fire that destroyed a business 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
Golden Harvest Supermarket, which is owned by Abaco Markets Limited, alleged that the June 17, 2001 fire started in BEC\u2019s transformer vault that was located on its property, and spread to the supermarket.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs alleged that three utility transformers belonging to BEC were on the Abaco Markets property adjacent to the rear of the supermarket, and used a part of the supermarket\u2019s exterior wall as the back wall of the transformer vault.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs alleged that BEC\u2019s failure to design its vault in compliance with the Bahamas Building Code caused the fire.<\/p>\n
Justice Stephen Isaacs agreed that BEC\u2008did not adhere to the requirements of the building code.<\/p>\n
He said, \u201cIt is accepted that BEC owes a duty of care to the public in respect of the manner of provision of electricity to the public.<\/p>\n
“From the evidence, the installations of the transformers in the vault that existed, considering its construction and location, was certainly careless.\u00a0 Saving costs cannot be the deciding factor when dealing with the supply of electricity.\u00a0 BEC\u2019s conduct is therefore directly connected to the injury suffered by the plaintiff.<\/p>\n
“Had the vault complied with Regulation 3901 of the Building Code it would not have been in the location that it was in, and any fire inside the vault would not have spread to the store.\u00a0 In my judgment there was clearly a breach of BEC\u2019s common law duty to exercise the greatest possible care and to use every possible precaution for the plaintiff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Supreme Court judge has determined that the Bahamas Electricity Corporation’s negligence led to a fire that destroyed a business 10 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[90,32,142,135,212],"class_list":["post-11041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-bec","tag-courts","tag-incompetence","tag-small-business","tag-utilities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}