BL&P efforts covered by insurance

BL&P Managing Director, Roger Blackman, says that the expenditure used to carry out restor-ation efforts post Hurricane Elsa will not be passed on to the customer, but associated costs will be covered by insurance.

According to Blackman, “...Like many other utilities across the world and certainly those that are in areas prone to hurricanes, there is no commercial insurance for wires and poles. It is not available essentially. So many utilities have had to come up with their own solutions. To deal with that, in our case and some others in the region, we would have established a Self Insurance Fund. We also have a captive insurance company and so basically the damages and costs associated with the event will be covered under insurance,” he said.

With customers left without power since the passage of Hurricane Elsa querying whether they will see a discount on their electric bills, officials from the Barbados Light & Power have also explained that persons only pay for what they use. During a press briefing to update the public on restoration efforts of the utility company yesterday evening, Director of Customer Solutions, Kim Griffith-Tang How, said: “What we want to assure our customers is, once there’s an outage, you’re not being billed, you’re only billed for what you use. So with outages, customers aren’t being billed, the meter isn’t turning. And so it’s not that people are going to be billed for the days that they’ve been out... We see some comments are certainly from customers who are concerned about that.”

It was also revealed by officials that there have been 36 claims of damage to equipment as a result of the power disruption during the passage of Hurricane Elsa.

Officials responded to suggestions that certain areas were prioritised over others as it relates to restoration efforts. Griffith-Tang How however explained that “priority customers” for the BL&P refers to essential services like the Barbados Water Authority, fire stations and ports of entry. “Then we turn our attention to key commercial areas ... such as Bridgetown and Warrens area ... as well we would look to connect customers that are in the tourism industry ... and key commercial customers to bring back up commerce.

“And then following that we look to restore residential customers that are in areas where there are large clusters of customers and then from there we work our way towards smaller pockets of customers. So that’s typically how we approach restoration,” she explained. (JH)