By KHRISNA RUSSELL

Deputy Chief Reporter

krussell@tribunemedia.net

WHITNEY Heastie, Bahamas Power and Light CEO, sought to dispel speculation yesterday that a fire at BPL’s Clifton Pier Power plant was the result of an ill advised call to operate a generator when the conditions were not right.

Equipment at the plant suffered extensive damage after a fire in September.

Following the incident, it had been rumoured an executive gave the directive to have one of the generators turned on despite advice to the contrary.

Mr Heastie and BPL chairman Donovan Moxey were guests on radio talk show The Revolution when questions over the operation of the generator were raised.

“Well I think the call was made a week earlier once the asset was returned from the repair work that was done,” Mr Heastie said when he was asked if he was the one who made the call.

“The asset was handed back over to operations on Sunday. They started their normal checks and it was on Friday that the incident occurred and so there was nothing abnormal here where the assets was not brought back the time that it should have been brought back. It was all normal protocol for that asset to come back the way it was brought back. All the checks were done and everything was in order for that asset to return to service.”

It has been more than two months since three fires struck Clifton Pier. Insurance adjusters have still not concluded their investigations and neither man could say when Clifton Pier would be brought back to its full operational capacity.

They could neither say if sabotage was to blame.

Regarding a timeline of how long the Clifton facility was expected to be offline Mr Moxey said: “Again we don’t know until the assessment is done. What I can tell you is there are quite a number of contingency options that we’re working on right now because we don’t know exactly what the report is going to say. We don’t know exactly what’s going to be the state.

“And so from our perspective we are trying to get those high efficiency low cost assets back online as soon as possible and again, the summer of next year is a very, very sort of optimistic date that we put out there because we understand that’s the start of the summer season and we are doing everything we can for the start of that.

“Even though there’s some things that we can’t come and readily say - because we are still waiting for the investigation to come through - we are waiting for us to do a fuller assessment on D811 and 12 before we are going to come out and say these will be in operation.

“We are also working on contingencies as well just in the event that they can’t be back in operation. So there are quite a number of things we are working on to make sure we can share some of that base load back at Clifton.

“If we - myself or Mr Heastie -  had jumped in and said to the insurance company ‘get out of our way we want to see if we can get these things online’ - all of a sudden now there is someone interfering in an investigation that’s another issue. We don’t want that.

“So our position is - let them do the work.”