By EARYEL BOWLEG

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

Many parts of New Providence were affected by power outages on Friday after a fault resulted in the Big Pond Primary Substation and Blue Hills Power Station going offline.

In a Facebook post, Bahamas Power and Light explained that those in the east, southeast and central were affected for an estimated two hours.

“BPL confirms that at 12:01pm, while performing switching operations at the national stadium, a fault on the transmission network resulted in both our Big Pond Primary Substation and Blue Hills Power Station going offline. The Clifton Pier Power Station remained online supplying western and southwest New Providence,” the post read.

“Customers in the East, southeast and central portions of New Providence were off for approximately two hours. We were able to isolate the problem, and our teams worked diligently to return the affected areas to service, beginning with the Shirley Street area around 1:30pm.”

It was indicated that restoration continued until after 2 pm and their team were able to restore power to areas out of service, except Fort Charlotte and Paradise Island. Yet, services became interrupted for people in the southwest and western portions of the island.

“As our teams were working to bring the remaining customers back online, the engines at the Clifton Pier Power Station – which had remained on during the earlier outage – tripped offline, interrupting service for customers in the southwest and western portions of New Providence,” said BPL.

“This second outage also would have impacted some customers who had already been on, including those in Winton, Carmichael and Wulff Road. Focused and determined effort allowed us to recover from the second outage, and return all customers to service at 5:31PM. Investigations are continuing at this time on both incidents and we will update our customers as information becomes available. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience as we work to improve our service.”

Last week Tuesday outside of Cabinet, Works Minister Desmond Bannister expressed confidence that there will be no load shedding in New Providence this summer.