Early on Sunday morning about 1AM, the BU household was plunged into darkness. A quick look through a window confirmed that as far as the eye could there was darkness. However, because it was so late we scurried off to bed earlier than planned, disappointed that our viewing of the Olympic broadcast was abruptly curtailed.
We freely admit that we have always had good things to say about the reliability in the service provided by the Barbados Light & Power Company Limited (BL&P) over the years. It is therefore of concern that in recent times we can easily recall three or four occasions when the island has suffered island wide outages. The most famous of the outages was the time a monkey was said to have caused the shutdown.
In all the explanations we have heard, Chief Marketing Manager of the BL&P Stephen Worme has been consistent in his message. Whether caused by monkey or bad weather it triggered a shutdown of the BL&P grid. It is good to know as a subscriber that the BL&P has a system in position that will trigger a shutdown to avoid severe damage to its network. Is the BU household being naïve by asking why should a monkey or the mild bad-weather experienced early Sunday morning have shutdown the BL&P electricity transmission?
We are asking questions which the average-man on the streets of Barbados is beginning to ask. Maybe we are being too hard on the BL&P. Maybe what has transpired in recent months is acceptable given the vagaries of operating a fossil powered company. To our layman way of thinking we appear to be experiencing a level of outages which is unacceptable in the year 2008.
More questions than answers. There was a time Chief Marketing Manager Stephen Worme would have responded directly to the concerns of the BU family. Unfortunately that door has been slammed shut. Hopefully the cloak of anonymity that BU affords can encourage some level of response.
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