By LYNAIRE MUNNINGS

Tribune Staff Reporter

lmunnings@tribunemedia.net

THE fire that damaged a Bahamas Power and Light power station in North Andros on Wednesday also disrupted the water supply for many.

Yesterday, deputy press secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister Keishla Adderley said although the water supply had been partially restored, one unit remained out of service.

Her comments came as BPL announced that it began to restore power on the island but warned that customers would temporarily suffer five-hour interruptions because the first unit connected to the network is insufficient to meet peak demands. BPL said it estimated this would be resolved between 48 to 72 hours.

“In the final analysis, the wellfields, as you may know, were also affected by this situation, and it’s been determined that a new generator at a cost of about $88,000 is being proposed,” Ms Adderley said. “A new generator will be put into place to completely resolve their issue of water generation.”

Meanwhile, BPL said two generator units capable of generating electricity for the North Andros community arrived on the island.

BPL CEO Shevonn Cambridge had said he expected power to be restored by Wednesday evening or yesterday morning, but that did not happen.

In a statement yesterday evening, the company said it restored supply to the first group of customers Thursday evening. BPL said supply would gradually be restored to communities to avoid unnecessary stresses on the network.

Some residents complained about outages elsewhere in The Bahamas yesterday.

Regarding a three-hour outage in Eleuthera, Arnette Ingraham, communications manager at BPL, said: “The Eleuthera operations team had to perform an emergency shutdown to change a damaged pole. When the work was completed, there were several reports of low voltage that required an additional outage for customers south of Rock Sound.”

She said yesterday’s emergency outage affected the Rock Sound and Tarpum Bay areas between 10am and 1.30pm.

In New Providence, the Sea Breeze area experienced outages most of the day. Ms Ingraham said the cause of the blackout was not identified.