Gas outage under scrutiny

In light of the recent natural gas disruption which affected a number of businesses along the south and west coasts, Minister of Energy and Water Resources Wilfred Abrahams says officials are carrying out investigations to know what emergency measures can be put in place should there be a recurrence.

The approximately 45-minute outage, which occurred last Saturday around 7 p.m., is said to have resulted in thousands of dollars in losses to businesses on the two coasts, and some business operators have indicated they intended to seek compensation.

Apologizing for the occurrence, Abrahams told members of the media on Friday that it was unfortunate that the incident happened when it did.

The National Petroleum Corporation (NPC) has also apologized to affected customers, while promising to improve its operations.

“The management and board of NPC are picking apart exactly what happened. We can’t stop things from happening but we can do our best to put preventative measures and redundancies in place so if something does happen the impact would not be felt as significantly,” said Abrahams.

“We apologize to all the businesses that were put out and experienced losses as a result of the outage. I am not trivializing it, I am not minimizing it and I am not stopping anyone from seeking compensation. The businesses will do what it is they have to do and we will deal with that if and when that happens.”

Stressing that he was satisfied with the short time in which the matter was addressed, Abrahams explained that “even the best maintained systems” could experience problems, he said.

Last Saturday’s break in natural gas transmission was caused by a malfunctioning valve at its Belle, St Michael facility. An outage was also experienced earlier in the month.

Abrahams gave the assurance that there was no shortage of natural gas in Barbados.

“BNOC (Barbados National Oil Company Ltd), NPC and all of our energy companies, they pride themselves on the delivery of a safe and efficient service. Yes, they had an outage with the natural gas earlier in January and that was rectified in short order as well. Obviously, it caused disruption and obviously it is something we are taking very seriously because we don’t want a repeat of it. If one of our customers is unhappy then we are unhappy. So when you have a situation where you have an outage affecting a number of people that is something we take very seriously,” said Abrahams.
marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb