Precious commodity at risk

Precious commodity at risk
Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) CEO, Whitney Heastie. (FILE PHOTO)

Power cuts detrimental

 

The instability of electricity in Abaco continues to be a vexing situation for residents, who on Sunday evening, had to endure more than 12 hours without power supply, which also led to a disruption to running water.

Since the Wilson City power plant had a complete generation breakdown more than a month ago, residents reported to Eyewitness News, that most of the water supply on the island cannot function without electricity.

“We can’t flush when we use the bathroom and this is becoming a major issue for us because, for many of us, the light goes out too frequently,” said one resident, who did not wish to be identified.

When contacted for comment, Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) General Manager Whitney Haestie said, the recent outage was planned and had nothing to do with the cooling system breakdown.

He added that residents should prepare themselves for at least another mass outage as it is necessary to make the much need repairs.

“The planned outages are simply to modify the system to correct long standing issues…,” Haestie said.

“These are planned outages to fix the system so we still have one more outage like that to go.”

As for correcting the shortfalls within the Wilson Cay plant, Haestie reported that work is progressing.

He said, “We had one pump in service so we’ve got two pumps out of four that are operational. We are redesigning the system so that the motors are no longer underwater and the other two will get to us before the end of April.”

About Genea Noel

Genea Noel is the news director and weeknight TV news anchor at Eyewitness News. She began working at Eyewitness News in 2018 as the newsroom editor and was subsequently promoted during her tenure. As a household name who graces the screens of thousands of Bahamian homes each night, Genea has racked up an impressive five Bahamas Press Club awards, including “The Cyril Stevenson Award for Outstanding Political Journalism” (2020), “Best Studio Live Producer” (2020) and “Best Newscast” (2018).