An official of the Grand Bahama Power Company (GBPC) spoke with ZNS to confirm the restoration of power on the island of Grand Bahama after heavy rain and strong winds were experienced on the island over the weekend.
GBPC Communications Director Cleopatra Russell said that during the period of severe weather on the island approximately one third of customers experienced issues with power. Russell explained what GBPC crews encountered, “we would have seen customer who would have been restored and then winds came again long after the passing was anticipated of the storm. We would no longer see affects and we have had those customers have to be re-restored again. Crews worked up until 4am on both mornings. We had a little under a hundred of our customers into Monday morning who were still without power.”
The Communications Director said GBPC did not execute a controlled shutdown. ”The high winds brought a lot of debris and a lot of impact on to the system. The system is designed to protect itself. When winds get to a certain miles per hour the system shuts itself of for protection purposes and in some instances that’s what happened. In other instances we had a few polls that ended up coming down. We had a poll that caught on fire. We had a lot of debris that ended up into the secondary and that impacted our ability for us to be able to restore as efficiently as we wanted to.”
According to Russell 99% of impacted customers were restored on Sunday.
