The National Petroleum Corporation (NPC) says it is working to avoid outages similar to the one that occurred on Saturday night and caused thousands of dollars in losses to businesses along the South and West Coasts of Barbados.
In a media release today, the NPC apologised to all affected customers, but said it was also striving to improve its operations.
“The NPC continues to closely monitor its systems for any potential issues and wishes to advise customers that we are working assiduously to put contingency and redundancy measures in place to avoid the recurrence of similar incidents,” the statement said.
It was around 7 p.m. on Saturday, the NPC said, when it “experienced a mechanical fault at its regulator plant located at the Belle, St Michael”.
Although a response team was deployed immediately, it took 45 minutes to rectify the problem.
“Despite this it took some time for the pressure to build back up in the system and for normal service to resume.
“While the disruption to the supply was limited to a few large customers on the West Coast and the South Coast, the NPC acknowledges that the loss of natural gas supply severely affects all those who depend on it and we take our obligation to provide a safe and consistent supply of natural gas very seriously,” the statement also said.
Restaurant owners and operators told The Nation they noticed the drop in natural gas around 7:15 p.m. on Saturday. Some had to turn away walk-ins and cancel reservations, while others served cold meals. Food which was not up to standard was also dumped. (PR/SAT)