Customers clueless as BL&P probes cause of fault
All power has been restored after a problem within the Barbados Light and Power (BL&P) network triggered an island-wide outage yesterday.
Just before six in the morning, fans whirred down, television screens went black and irons clicked off, as a fault occurring at the Whitemark substation left Barbadians powerless for several hours.
As a result, several districts were also left without water as operations ceased at the various pumping stations due to the outage.
While some areas had power restored in just over an hour, the majority had to wait longer, resulting in several businesses having no choice but to keep their doors closed and to send their staff home, including the Barbados Water Authority, which closed its Pine and City offices.
Throughout it all, BL&P staff was very busy throughout the morning restoring electricity to its customers, and members were kept up-to-date on the utility company’s work through hourly updates on its Facebook page.
It wasn’t until almost seven hours later that electricity was fully restored to all districts.
In a statement issued to media editors and on its Facebook page, the BL&P outlined: “Areas along the south of the island, including parts of St. Philip were restored shortly after 7 a.m., while other affected customers in Bridgetown and its outskirts and some central and eastern areas were restored by 10:27 a.m. Service to the remaining affected customers in the north and west of the island was restored by 12:48 p.m. Some lines had to be restored manually in the field.”
Apologising for the inconvenience, the BL&P said that investigations were ongoing into the cause of the fault. (JMB)
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