When the Lights went down Island-wide

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou never miss a good thing until it’s gone. Perhaps worse, you acknowledge the importance of your utility companies only when disaster strikes. Wednesday’s not fully explained blackout offered much food for thought. Some areas were affected for several hours; others for less than sixty minutes. In any event, here are some of the reported consequences of Wednesday’s outage.

Gary (fisherman): Well, LUCELEC sabotage me. I cannot get fuel for my boat,
I cannot conduct my business.

Fisherman: A good thing I full up yesterday. But a lot of the other fellas couldn’t go out whole morning. Sometimes that’s a whole catch they miss.

Nico (bus driver): I cannot go and do my next trip yet, because my gas will finish and is a risk I’ll take if I expect the current to come back before I reach the next gas station.

Helen: I can’t get anything done in town today, pay no bills, cannot buy things in some places and it was my only off day. These things I either have to wait to do later or spend money so my children can come to do it on Saturday.

Mr. Big C: Hey! It looks like LUCELEC and WASCO team up against Looshans. No electricity, no water in how many places. So what if I had to wash my clothes today now?

WASCO: Because of this [outage] we are unable to transact financial business with our customers. So that means we are suffering a delay in terms of the monies that would come into the company. So to now go and expend monies on fueling the generators is a bit of a challenge for us right now, especially because we don’t know how long this power outage is going to last. It’s no fault of ours.

Tiffany (infant school student): We have no current so we might have class outside today. After the teachers’ meeting they will tell us but it is still nice to have school in the dark.

Market vendor: Well you see why people must take agriculture seriously? All the suit-and-tie people cannot do anything today but I still have customers.

Shop owner: I had to close the shop on a day people had nothing to do and were coming in to browse. But my computer cannot work and the credit card machine needs current.

Paul: My phone battery died. I cannot give it to somebody to charge for me yet. I was expecting an important call today but I couldn’t charge the phone this morning.

Digicel: It affected the services we provide but not our mobile network. Of course our Internet customers were affected but the issue was entirely with LUCELEC.

Electrician: That just add two more hours to my day. Then I still have to come tomorrow to finish things I didn’t have time to do for that job.