Bartica residents are enduring scheduled blackouts once again as one of the generators at the town’s power station has stopped working.
Mayor Gifford Marshall confirmed yesterday that the town is now experiencing another wave of outages. “I received a call on Monday and GPL [Guyana Power and Light Inc] indicated that they will be doing some maintenance work on one of the machines from 6am on Wednesday to about noon,” Marshall said. Since then, he added, he was told that they ran into “a number of difficulties,” which set them back to the same position they were in several weeks ago.
Prior to September 18, the residents of Bartica had to endure almost three weeks of scheduled outages because of a non-functioning generator at the power station, which was scheduled for maintenance.
Fixing the generator was taking longer than expected, so the power company decided to move a generator from Onverwagt, West Coast Berbice, to Bartica to assist. However, because of the condition of the Linden – Bartica trail, the transportation of the generator was delayed several days.
“It is not acceptable and is causing us major distress. We have been enduring this for years and now here it is again,” Marshall said yesterday, while adding that the council was not happy with the manner in which GPL has been treating Bartica.
“They need new generators. It’s been too long and it appears as if GPL is very insensitive towards Bartica. They took off the other generators on Wednesday at 6am. They didn’t even consider the children or other persons [who] had to prepare for school or work,” he pointed out.
Marshall added that while the company has been running advertisements, communication with the residents has been poor. He said he was told that MACORP was expected yesterday to fix the problem. “That’s going to mean that we are going to be down for another two or three days and then we are back to square one. Even though with this amount of load shedding there is no guarantee that power will be restored tomorrow [today] or Sunday,” Marshall said.
In addition to the power outages, Marshall said, GPL has been provoking the residents as it has a disconnection crew in the town. “We don’t think that it’s best at this time for them to do disconnection,” he said.
Marshall also explained that some of the residents are holding the municipality accountable for the blackouts, which should not be so. “GPL is a company and should be held accountable for what is happening,” he said.
He said businesses have already started to count their losses. “People have stocked up on their goods and now they are losing them [to spoilage] because of the blackout. Businesses also have to close earlier and those who invest in a generator have to study about the extra costs,” he added.
He pleaded with the power company to ensure that full electricity is restored to the town as soon as possible and to work diligently in replacing the old generators to avoid a recurrence.
