About a week ago an unknown issue at Bahamas Power and Light resulted in the entire island being left without power for hours and for others a little longer than expected then just last Tuesday customers in Western New Providence experienced a partial outage.

On Friday, January 13th, 2017 the day the first outage occurred sometime around 5am BPL had issued a statement informing customers that their power should have been fully restored by 8am, however for some that was not the case.

The statement also read that BPL would conduct further investigations to determine exactly what cause the island wide outage.

A week later, the company says a third party damage to an underground cable was directly linked to the total loss of generation that day.

“BPL is now working closely with that third party to review its operations to prevent a similar occurrence,” said BPL Vice President Kenneth Kociuba.

As for the most recent outage, a bus bar failure is to blame.

“A bus bar failure at our Windsor Field Substation was to blame for the outage,” he said.

“The failure was unforeseen as we recently completed thorough assessments of all substations following Hurricane Matthew and problems that were evident, at the time, were addressed.”

He further noted that in response to this most recent outage teams are now conducting a secondary review of all primary substations.

Understanding its customers’ frustrations, BPL says it has solutions in the works to ensure these occurrences do not repeat.

“We have been implementing improvements to increase reliability in New Providence and the Family Islands,” he said.

“These include making good use of the energy efficient 80 MW of power provided by the Aggreko engines, a new generating plant in Harbour Island, and the ongoing installation of new 33 kV underground cables between Blue Hills Power Station and the Big Pond Substation to increase transmitting capacity.”