Barbados Faces Islandwide Power Outage Causing Widespread Disruption

Barbados was plunged into some chaos yesterday following a sudden islandwide power outage from 11:30 a.m.

Many retail stores, schools, the University of the West Indies and other establishments were forced to close as elevators, escalators, computer systems, lights, cold storage units and air-conditioning units all came to a grinding halt.

It was not much better in food establishments, as point-of-sale card machines and automatic banking machines were also shut off, meaning it was cash-only transactions.

People at home were left to contend with the heat as fans came to a standstill. Phone and water services were also severely disrupted as most utilities are linked through electricity.

By 8 p.m., the Barbados Light & Power Company (BL& P) was reporting that power had been restored across the island.

The last islandwide power cut occurred on Tuesday, April 4, from 11:32 a.m., with power being fully restored by 5:15 p.m., according to BL& P back then.

Yesterday’s outage led to Acting Prime Minister Santia Bradshaw addressing the nation in the afternoon alongside Minister of Energy Senator Lisa Cummins and Minister of Education Kay McConney.

“We received communications from the Barbados Light & Power . . . that there was an islandwide outage. They have subsequently made all efforts to isolate that fault and restoration has commenced. However, it will take some time – some areas are restored but others not quite yet,” Cummins said.

McConney said there had been major disruption in all schools, including in some cases water pumps going offline as well as fans not working, so the decision was made to close schools at 1:30 p.m. She said buses would be redeployed to the schools – which would result in some displacement – and advised parents to pick up their children if possible.

Bradshaw said it was not an easy decision to close down institutions but this was necessary.

“One of the challenges is [the power] keeps tripping and as a consequence, we are not sure power will be back on before the end of the school or business day,” she said.

While acknowledging the inconvenience to schools and the wider public, Bradshaw said that without power things had come to a halt, so closure was necessary, adding that public offices would also close at 1:30 p.m.

“We’ve also advised the private sector to give their workers some flexibility to be able to collect their children from school and if able, return to work later [that] afternoon,” she said.

Even some businesses with generators were not spared, chairman of the Barbados Private Sector Association Trisha Tannis revealed.

“We promote our businesses to be resilient and to mitigate losses as much as possible by investing in things such as generators, but even some of those failed today. There were some surges which actually shut some of the generators down, so it was certainly a far from ideal situation,” she said.

Tannis, speaking to the Weekend Nation shortly before BL& P managing director Roger Blackman went on the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Newsnight programme to give an update, said they were waiting on word from the power company.

“There was quite a bit of disruption, as you can imagine. We will wait on the full report. We are very curious as to how we can improve our resilience and prevent these sorts of things from occurring.

“I think we really need to get the full assessment from the company. We all need to look back and see how today could have gone differently – what failed and what worked – and understand what went wrong,” she said.