After a much anticipated meeting last week between Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) executives and Bahamas Electrical Workers Union (BEWU) representatives, BEWU President, Paul Maynard said, they are  still working things  out now that there  is  dialogue between the parties involved. 

Mr. Maynard  stressed the need for the company’s system to be updated, and that he said is no easy fix. 

“Our system is antiquated it needs to be upgraded. We haven’t had a protection audit from 1990, and they fixed the problem back then and now it’s out of whack again. 

“It needs to be fixed, simple. And that’s the problem, and this [isn’t] an easy fix either,” he said.

“The public believes you can just go out there and buy a whole protection system [but] they have to come in here, audit it, know what it needs to do and it’s going to cause at least 15 million dollars to fix it, it’s not as simple as apples and oranges. 

“It took us a long while to get into this foolishness and it’s going to take us some time to get out,” he added.

Mr. Maynard said they’re waiting on an auditor to assess the system, but that there’s no guarantee this will be anytime soon.

“They say they [have to] bring someone to do an audit, but then he now has to fix it, so you’re looking at next year maybe, and that’s if the turnaround time is good.

“You’re looking at January/ February which isn’t a big deal, because it’s the winter time but you understand what I’m saying.”

The union president also pointed to Sunday’s power outage as a result of the outdated system.  

“Lightning [struck] the 132 KB transmission line, and this is exactly what I was saying, and see everyone around town making noise saying, I said that I will turn the light off but I further stated that we don’t have to do anything, we could sit back and it’ll happen,” he said.