Unacceptable!

Inexplicable, unacceptable and embarrassing.

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley used these words to describe yesterday’s islandwide power outage – the second in as many days.

Taking to the radio to address the nation, she outlined her urgent request to meet with the Chairman of the Barbados Light and Power (BL&P)/Emera yesterday evening to get to the bottom of the “unacceptable situation”.

“We are not engineers and we will await a word as to how a country could have all of its generating capacity down at the same time. It is inexplicable to me and I trust that this evening when I meet with the Chairman, we will have all the answers,” she said, adding that government was also taking its own independent advice on these matters.
“It is unacceptable, it is embarrassing, but in life we do not get to choose the hand that we play,” she added.

In the meantime, the country’s leader assured that all essential services were operational.

“With respect to the hospital, the airport, the seaport and the prison and all the other critical institutions, I can inform the country that all of our power generating capacity is working and that we will ensure that we stick to normalcy as close as possible,” she noted.

Regarding the water outages due to loss of power at the pumping stations, Mottley stated, “where the pumping stations cannot be brought back up, we are ensuring there is a deployment of the water trucks in order of priority that they are needed”.

“Similarly, we expect that with the Belle (pumping station) back up, most of the island to have access to the water today as long as the power can be stabilised.”

The PM further assured that government has done all in its power to ensure that the citizenry remained safe throughout the situation and urged persons to check on elderly relatives living alone.

“Rest assured that the country is safe and while we wait for the BL&P to resolve this issue we will do our part to make sure Barbadians can go about their business as much as possible,” she said. (JMB)