Up to Friday morning, officials at the Bahamas Electricity Corporation had still not confirmed whether electricity had been restored to the entire island of New Providence following a blackout triggered by what was believed to be early morning transmission problems.
But, as late as 10 a.m. Friday residents of the Eastern Road and Carmichael reported that they were still without electricity.
The island-wide power failure, which started at 5:25 a.m Thursday caused chaos on the streets of the capital, led to the closure of schools and left thousands of people inconvenienced.
On Thursday afternoon, officials said that 70 percent of the island’s homes and businesses had power but around 7 p.m., a number of residents experienced a second blackout, which lasted until nearly midnight.
At a press conference late Thursday afternoon BEC General Manager Bradley Roberts could only repeat what he had said throughout the day.
He said officials believed that the problem was the result of a transmission fault between the Clifton Pier and Big Pond Power stations.
“We know that one of the 132 kilovolt lines connecting Clifton Pier to Big Pond came out on a fault so that may have caused some problems, but we can’t say with 100 percent certainty that is in fact what caused it,” he said.
He added that technicians had isolated the line from the rest of the system.
Before 7 a.m., BEC workers tried to re-start the gas turbines at the Blue Hills Power plant, which were also affected by the Clifton Pier-Big Pond fault, according to Mr. Roberts.
But that was unsuccessful, he said.
Shortly before 10 a.m. Mr. Roberts said, “We have resorted to a contingency plan to get power in from Clifton Pier and are working on that now. Hopefully, within the next hour we will begin restoring power to New Providence.”
But attempts to get the system up and running within the hour were frustrated due to rain, according to Mr. Roberts.
“The main plant which normally emanates from Blue Hills, we did encounter some problems with that because it appears as if the heavy rain caused some equipment damage on one of the turbines and caused us to have to start over from scratch,” he said.
He added, “If you have a real big fault in the system on a major transmission line sometimes in order for the system to protect itself, generators trip off and once you have a number of generators tripping off it is difficult to stop the others from shutting down also,” he said. “Under those conditions you are likely to have an island-wide blackout.”
Around 11:30 a.m. Thursday, reports from BEC said that electricity would be restored to the Blue Hills area by 12:30 p.m. and throughout the rest of New Providence by 1:30 p.m, but that was not the case.
Mr. Roberts said that once electricity was completely restored, investigations would be carried out to determine the true cause of the island-wide blackout.
BEC’s Deputy General Manager of Engineering and Planning Anthony Forbes said that workers began to carry out repairs around 6 a.m.
“We were lucky to have one of the machines remain running. At about six o’clock, we commenced reinstatement of the supplies, unfortunately at that time, we had an additional failure of one of the units that exacerbated the situation,” Mr. Forbes said.
He said subsequently, they encountered a number of problems with support emergency starting systems, which he attributed to the delay in restoring power.
As a result of the power failure, many people were left without water and were unable to carry out normal morning routines, like ironing school uniforms.
Many people reported that they had to resort to heating irons on stoves and bathing in bottle water.
Others raced to local laundry marts to have their clothes pressed.
By 10 o’clock Thursday, many schools had announced that they would be closing early. Government schools, in fact, closed at noon.
At the College of The Bahamas, classes were held in pitch-dark classrooms and many lecturers were forced to end classes early.
There were also reports that the generator had malfunctioned at the Princess Margaret Hospital this morning.
The blackout also led to frustrations among merchants.
“[The power outage] is really crippling [business], said Jeannie Kemp, proprietor of a souvenir shop on Bay Street. “Some of the tourists were complaining, saying that they might as well go back to the ship because there isn’t anything that they can do with so many of the stores closed.”
Ms. Kemp said the blackout would probably hurt profits for the day because she still has to pay her employees although no business was being conducted.
An employee of the Ralph Lauren store added, “This is an inconvenience for us with the store being closed because business is already slow and businesses on Bay Street really need to make up some dollars.”
She added, “We’re just sitting down [enjoining] the cool breeze watching the cars pass because that’s all that we can do.”
But not all merchants were so unlucky.
Teddy Mitrogiannis, manager of a downtown clothing store, said the establishment remained opened because it has a generator that was up and running.
“We understand that these things happen and we are going to try and do our best for the next few hours so long as it won’t be for the next few days,” Mr. Mitrogiannis said.
“It [was] good to have the generator,” he added.
BEC officials say they intend to launch a full-scale investigation to determine exactly what went wrong and try to prevent the problem from occurring in the future.
The Bahama Journal
