By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrrolle@tribunemedia.net

ABACO residents say they are suffering from an electricity crisis.

Over the past ten days, electricity has been off in parts of the island for most of each day, according to some residents.

A Bahamas Power and Light notice said the company had transmission line issues.

“Power has been off for now for well over ten days,” said Junior Mernard, a resident of Hope Town. “In a 24-hour period, we would be off anywhere between 12 to 16 hours a day. It’s off as I speak to you now.”

He said the situation is affecting the island’s efforts to rebound from Hurricane Dorian, with some tourists shortening their vacation time.

“Abaco has done all it can to finally rebuild a robust economy and this utility company is doing everything to kill it, burning up people’s appliances and it’s affecting our visitors too,” he said.

“It’s impacting our tourists so much. I mean a lot of these houses have back-up generators, but the generators are failing. We have people paying ten to fifteen thousand a week for a house and the power goes off.”

Roscoe Thompson, head of the Marsh Harbour/Spring City Township, said it is uncertain what is causing the outages.

“For the past week, it’s been twice a day,” he said.

“Some areas like the cays are experiencing a lot more outages and certain areas in Marsh Harbour like Little Orchard, was off for like 16 hours. Last night, we were off from 6 o’clock until I think 2 o’clock this morning, and then we were back off again for an hour.”

Daphne Degregory-Miaoulis, Abaco’s Chamber of Commerce president, said the situation is terrible and is preventing businesses from functioning.

“I do see the complaints in the different chat groups where people are saying, ‘any idea when the power is going to come on’, so I know from north to south, the power outages have been constant over the last few days,” she said.

“To run the generators, it’s very expensive, or they run the risk of not being able to open or function, and right now we’re having terrible weather. It’s very gloomy and dark and if you walk into a business with no lights in, I mean you’re not going to go in cuz it looks like it’s closed anyway.”

The power cuts also affected island’s airport, with flight agents checking passengers in manually.

The Tribune was sent a video showing portions of the airport in darkness with tourists sitting on the ground.

Central and South Abaco MP John Pinder said he was aware of the situation and had asked BPL’s team to keep the community updated.

“As your Member of Parliament, I will continue to push for stable power now and rectifying issues for reliable power moving forward,” Mr Pinder said in a Facebook post.