By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

Harbour Island residents yesterday asserted that “this is the real hell” as they battled another day of constant Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) outages.

Miriam Percentie, recalling multiple promises that the electricity woes would be solved by now, said she returned home from work after 5pm to find there was no BPL power. This was despite a planned system outage supposed to have been over at 11am.

“Most persons are under the impression that the protest was in vain,” she said, referring to last summer’s demonstration by Harbour Island residents to advocate for better water and power services. “The minister came on and she said whatever she said, but that was it. That was just rhetoric, because we had a little relief after that, but we’re back to the same nonsense.

“Like I said, we had the protest and like, that was only it for the moment, photo ops and whatever else, and that was it. You see the minister came on. I don’t know what the hell she was talking about. They so freaking out of touch.

“Where they living, the lifestyle of the rich and famous, and we suffering on a billion-dollar island where we have multi-million and billionaires who own houses here and come to our shores every year. And they still can’t do nothing better for us,” Ms Percentie added.

“BPL and Water and Sewerage promised Harbour Island that these woes are going to be behind us in short order, and we’re still dealing with both of them. I wouldn’t talk about Cable Bahamas, but we can do without cable. But light and water are essential.”

Ms Percentie questioned how a larger island, such as New Providence has more reliable power.  “My thing is this,” she added. “This has been going on from I was a little girl during the summer, but it’s worse now because we would expect it;  it just seemed normal.

“Come on. It’s 2025. If they sending people to the moon... we can’t have light and water in a tiny metropolis? That’s foolishness. And my thing about it is, like I just said to my general manager, who’s from Nassau, I said: Nassau is 22 by seven, compared to us two miles by half. If Nassau could have power for the most part, with Atlantis and all those other things going on, you think by now they haven’t come up with a plan so that we can have power on this little island?

“Why we can’t have a resolution. All we have is a bunch of flipping generators that are breaking down every other minute. And whenever they send a part here, it must be an after-market part or something that’s on the way out. I don’t get it,” Ms Percentie added.

“If they could power Nassau, right, why is it such a challenge to power this tiny island? Whether they have to replace all of the generators, whether they have to build solar infrastructure into our power plant, whether they need back-up batteries or generators, or whatever, they need to do something.

“You can imagine we were off, let’s say from 8am to 11am. I come home shortly after 5pm and power is already out. We don’t know what time we can look forward to having power again, whether we have to sleep in the heat. We don’t know.

“And they just coming up with these repetitious posts in the chat about this failure, this thing and the next thing. And ‘we working feverishly, and we appreciate, y’all...” Appreciate what? We don’t appreciate the heat and the flipping dark. And I just paid my BPL bill today, because if I don’t pay it, they’ll come to turn me off.

BPL released an advisory that there would be a planned outage from 8am to 11am yesterday “to facilitate critical installation works and equipment checks at the power station”. It later sent out a statement stating “power supply to the Dunmore and Narrows feeders has been interrupted to allow for urgent repairs to one of our units”.

“The Dunmore and Narrows feeders were opened at 4.45pm to facilitate emergency generation repairs at the Harbour Island power station,” BPL said.