Bahamas: Island-Wide Outage Lasts 10 Hours

November 7, 2003

An island-wide blackout hit New Providence Thursday at 5:25 a.m., leaving 65,000 Bahamas Electricity Corp. customers in the dark.

Last night, the exact cause of the outage had not been determined and though by 6 p.m. BEC said 70 per cent of New Providence had power, many areas suffered sporadic blackouts after that.

General manager Bradley S. Roberts told The Guardian at an evening press conference at BEC's Soldier Road plant, that it "appeared" the blackout was caused by a fault on one of its three 132-kilowatt transmission lines between Clifton Pier and Big Pond. The fault, he said, caused the system to collapse and generators to trip off-load.

"Once this happened, we then had to mobilise. Our operators isolated the fault and attempted to restore power. People who were off duty at the time were summoned immediately and responded immediately," Mr. Roberts said.

The outage lasted some 10 hours before the first area was restored around 3:30 p.m.

Mr. Roberts said the blackout struck at a time when the corporation was operating under minimum load condition and only a minimum number of generators were in operation.

"If you have a large fault occurring at that time, it is possible and very likely that you will have that type of reaction," he said, adding that the fault could have been "weather related." He said, however, that though there was no obvious sign of a problem, there might have been some type of "transient fault" on the line.

Mr. Roberts stressed that there was no evidence that the line was deliberately damaged or tampered with.

"We don't see any extensive damage (of the line) at this time. We know that it tripped off and normally when you have a line that tripped off, you may see a line down, but we did not see anything like this," he said.

"Sometimes these faults are very small. Sometimes a tree may have touched a line, it might have been some lightning or a number of things that caused it to happen, but we have not completed our investigation and do not want to speculate."

Mr. Roberts said the corporation was trying to have power fully restored by eight p.m. However, he was unable to state at the time, those areas that remained without electricity.

"What we try to do is make sure that the essential areas are put back into operation first, like the hospital and the airport. We did concentrate on commercial areas so that we don't adversely affect businesses and hotels, then we deal with domestic consumers," he said.

Mr. Roberts said that whenever power is fully restored, a "post-mortem" observation would be carried out, and a full-scale investigation launched in order to prevent another island-wide blackout.

Deputy general manager of field operations Kevin Basden called the blackout "abnormal". He claimed that BEC has never been "off-supply" for such a long period of time, unless the blackout was weather-related.

"For an island state under certain conditions, something of this nature may happen, however, the critical aspect is to be able to respond on a timely basis and to restore the system as soon as possible, but something of this magnitude is not a normal occurrence," he said.

By 2:30 p.m., when it was evident the blackout would last for at least a few hours more several businesses using generators were running out of diesel, and were scurrying around trying to get more fuel. That quickly began to decimate fuel suppies on the island as those companies tried to top up their tanks.

The blackout caused many businesses, such as beauty salons and mom and pop stores without generators to lose profits, after closing their doors for almost half the day because it was dark, they had no running water or operating cash registers.

Traffic was backed up at various locations throughout the capital, as traffic lights were also off and government schools were dismissed at noon.

When The Guardian visited City Markets in the South Beach shopping centre, there was a single line at one operating cash register and the regular morning cooked breakfast was not being served. City Markets at Lyford Cay closed its doors entirely, after experiencing problems with its generator.

General manager of City Markets, Bruce Souder, told The Guardian all of its locations have generators, but they don't "necessarily" have the capacity to power every department within the store. City Markets' priority, he said, is to take care of refrigeration when there is an outage. In regards to its Lyford Cay location, Mr. Souder said the necessary repairs were being made.

"We have not closed any of our stores, but we are still affected. And as far as equipment failures, we don't know what those are going to be until the power actually comes back on and unfortunately, we may have some of those," he said.

At Princess Margaret Hospital administrator Coralee Adderley said there was only a "slight delay" to get power booted up to operating rooms, but generators that supply power to other areas of the hospital, including the blood bank were running smoothly.

"We have 100-per-cent power and there has been no disruption in service."

The last island-wide power outage in New Providence was on Aug. 27 when a sub-contractor working at BEC's Clifton Pier power station damaged a cable that supplied power to one of its main transformers, causing the entire system to crash. Last year there was another island-wide outage on Oct. 30, after a car ran into a stay wire, causing an overhead line to be dislodged and a destabilizing generators at Clifton Pier, causing them to trip.

Over the past year, BEC has been plagued with constant power outages mainly due to problems with its No. 11 generator at Clifton Pier that was operating below capacity. It also encountered broken piston wings and cylinder lining-scuffing problems. Expenditure to purchase spare parts to correct these problems amounted to $1 million and experts were also flown in from various international companies to examine the generator.

BEC's $36-million No. 12 generator, purchased from the same company where No. 11 was purchased (Alstrom) is still not in operation. Implementation of this generator has been postponed on numerous occasions since its scheduled commissioning date of Aug. 30, 2002. On Aug. 23, The Guardian was told the No. 12 generator was not up and fully running, because it failed its first reliability run and further repairs were necessary.

Earlier this year, BEC implemented two new gas turbines. Gas turbine No. 8 provides 23-megawatt of plant for the corporation after a combined cycle is implemented. However, constant power outages persisted.

The 132-kilowatt transmission line in question was installed by BEC in 1992 from the Clifton Pier power station to Blue Hills and into Big Pond.

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