Many householders and business owners, including South and West Coast hoteliers, were left fuming yesterday as they were without natural gas for much of the day, from as early as 7 a.m.
The Barbados National Energy Company Limited confirmed later in the day, through its chief of operations Andrea Burnett-Edward, that the disruption was caused by a valve that malfunctioned in the closed position.
Loss of service
“This issue has resulted in the loss of service to some customers. There is no gas leak and no risk to public safety. The malfunction was mechanical in nature, with the valve failing in the off position, stopping the flow of gas to affected areas. In response, our technicians immediately began working to diagnose and resolve the problem,” she explained.
In a statement, Barbados Hotel & Tourism Association chairman Javon Griffith noted the potential severe impact the disruption could cause for many in the tourism sector.
“This outage has placed significant strain on the operations of several of our members, particularly hotels that are currently experiencing peak occupancy during the busy summer period. The disruption has notably affected restaurant services and hotel laundries – two critical components of dayto- day guest service.
“While some members have, as of 6 p.m., reported moderate restoration in supply, many properties have had to prioritise food and beverage operations in order to continue serving in-house guests, especially at all-inclusive properties,” he said.
General manager of Sugar Bay, Morgan Seale, lamented the inability of the utility company to put a time stamp on the fix.
“They really didn’t give any information that would allow anybody to operate. If you go and look at their Instagram and look at the two posts that they put, they both say the same thing: that they are still diagnosing the problem and they still don’t have an ETA for a fix.
“If you look in the comments, there are a lot of small business owners who are saying that doesn’t help us because we are trying to plan. Do we close the whole day? Do you think it will be back in three hours that we can serve dinner . . . ?
“We had to send home staff and cancel bookings completely in one of our restaurants because we just don’t know if there will be enough pressure when dinner comes around because we haven’t been told what the situation is.
“I am not blaming them by any means, but I know stuff happens and you just try and fix them . . . but some type of message about an ETA of some form, even if it’s just a guess at this point. It might be six hours or a tomorrow issue [which] allows people to plan their day,” he added.
Cancellations
Seale said the disruption cost his business thousands of dollars.
“In direct cancellations alone, it would be at least close to $10 000 today [yesterday]. What happens, too, like for example, we don’t have any hot water? We haven’t had from since this morning within the resort.
“Then what happens is that some guests would say, ‘That’s not my problem, that’s your problem and if you can’t supply me with hot water, then you are not giving me what I paid for’. So what happens is that you would have people demanding compensation as well. We already had a couple of requests for compensation at the front desk,” Seale added.
Wren Miller, food and beverage manager at Savannah Hotel, also on the South Coast, said they had to improvise.
“We had a wedding here for 130 people so we had to use all the skills presented to us to make it happen . . . We used grills with the same (LPG) bottles. We have sister properties that use gas, so we just used a shuttle to get things done off property and then they brought back to make this wedding happy,” he said.
On the West Coast, management of The Cliff in St James said that while affected by the gas outage, they were not severely impacted.
An employee said they were able to utilise a backup electrical system to keep business flowing as usual.
However, its sister restaurant QP Bistro, and several other establishments were forced to close their doors early as a result of having no natural gas. (SG)
