Villages between Charity and Supenaam on the Essequibo Coast have been plagued with blackouts for the past two days and the Guyana Power and Light Company Inc (GPL) has blamed the situation on damage to an insulator.
Residents have complained that the staff at the Essequibo branch of GPL were discourteous when they called to make inquiries about the power outage. “I felt outraged when I called to find out why we were having blackouts and the phone was hung up on me. As a customer, I have the right to call and find out about the blackouts,” one woman said. “The staff should be polite and even if they cannot answer the questions we may ask, they should not hang up the phone on anybody.”
A resident of Dartmouth, noting the frequency of blackouts on the Essequibo Coast, said “I believe we are having difficulties with the insulator here too often. It was just the other day we were having blackouts here, now is this again. When will we here in Essequibo have something good and proper for our use? We cannot even have access to the pipe water because of the blackout and we have to be using the rain water to do everything.”
Some small business owners were forced to purchase generators to sustain their businesses. The damaged insulator was expected to be fixed by yesterday but up until press time the power outages were still persistent.