Consultants from US based company Power Secure are in The Bahamas meeting with a team of experts from the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) to get to the root of last week’s island wide blackout in New Providence.
According to BEC Chairman Leslie Miller, the two sides have been locked in meetings both Monday and Tuesday.
“They’re visiting all our plants, looking at all of the instruments that we use. They’ve already gone to the Baillou Hills Power Plant. They’re going down to Clifton, doing an assessment of all that we have in New Providence to see to it that what occurs last week never reoccurs,” Mr. Miller said in an interview with the Bahama Journal yesterday.
“In due course, we will give the people a good overview after we’ve presented it to the prime minister and my minister – the deputy prime minister – as to what their findings are. We will do what is necessary to solve the problem and ensure that it doesn’t reoccur.”
It was around 9:00 p.m. last Thursday that thousands of New Providence residents were plunged in darkness for more than eight hours. Some residents claim they were still wrestling the outage up to midday Friday.
Photos even surfaced on social media sites showing agitated Bahamians seeking refuge in places like gas states, laundromats and beaches.
In the aftermath, Mr. Miller acknowledged that what happened was an “absolute disaster.”
“This whole situation appears to have been initiated at a substation at Soldier Road and when that substation detected a problem it went out,” he told the Bahama Journal during an earlier interview.
“That power was then transferred to Baillou Hill power station and the computers then told the system there was an overload, so it shut down the machine at Baillou Hill, through which a power surge was detected at Clifton.”
When asked how long it will take to resolve the issue, Mr. Miller could not say.
“We can’t put a timeline on this. You just want to get it right the first time. Whatever time it takes, we’re going to do it to get it right,” he said.
The BEC chairman has meantime promised that the corporation will discuss a compensation package for those affected by Thursday’s outage.
