Full power was restored to Bartica on Sunday night, but the town’s residents remain wary as they have no guarantee that the aged generators will continue to work as they should.
Speaking to Stabroek News on Monday, Mayor Gifford Marshall explained that the power was restored sometime between 7 pm and 8 pm on Sunday.
However, while the Town Council is grateful that the power was restored in less than a week, Marshall pointed out that there is need for the management of the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) to look at what happened over the past month in the town seriously and to ensure that nothing of the sort occurs again.
“While power is on at the moment we are currently communicating with central government and asking that these generators be replaced because they are aged and have been here for a very long time,” Marshall said, adding that the talks are going well.
“Based on what I have been able to gather central government will replace them but it won’t happen overnight,” he said.
“As we stand the systems are likely to go down, not that we are wishing for it, but we have to be realistic and practical because… those machines cannot support the needs of Bartica,” Marshall pointed out.
As an alternative, he said, the council was able to have a site visit to one of BK’s quarries and would be discussing the possibility of purchasing power directly so as to ease the power station.
Extending his gratitude on behalf of the council and the residents, Marshall heaped praise on the engineers and other workers who were on the ground working assiduously to ensure that power was restored as soon as possible. “We also want to thank the residents for their continued patience,” Marshall said.
“Well many businesses would’ve suffered losses within that time and families would’ve been uncomfortable but we can only hope that from this point we are going to move forward,” he added.
Marshall explained that the Town Council is still exploring the option of relocating the power station from First Avenue and a committee has been set up, which is discussing the move with GPL. The plot of land identified is away from the central business district and residents.
Prior to September 18, the residents of Bartica had to endure almost three weeks of outages because of a non-functioning generator at the power station, which was scheduled for maintenance.
Fixing the generator took longer than expected, so the power company decided to move a generator from Onverwagt, West Coast Berbice, to Bartica. However, because of the condition of the Linden – Bartica trail, the transportation of the generator was delayed by several days.
After a few weeks of having constant power supply, the town was hit with another series of blackouts when another of the generators went down last Monday.
