Battling in the Blackout of February 2022

‘Don’t expect much from that inquiry, no heads will roll, no apologies will be made and those in power will hope we soon forget.’

IT was an ordinary Wednesday, running on autopilot, waiting patiently for my children’s bedtime so I could have five blissful minutes to myself when BAM! The lights went out. Then BAM! There was no cell signal and surprise, my landline was down.

This is it, the apocalypse had begun.

Not really, but the fact that I had no way of communicating with the outside world was a tad concerning to me.

Wednesday’s blackout proved what we all knew, as a country we are severely unprepared for any actual disaster.

How did we make it to 2022, with absolutely no backup plans or emergency procedures for these types of situations?

It took one fault at the T&TEC 220KV Gandhi Village substation to completely cripple our country.

And where was our Government or head of our electricity commission you might ask? I don’t know I had no internet, radio stations were coming and going, there was nothing.

So I went hunting for phone service and I encountered chaos on the roads thanks to the outage of traffic lights and slow response to deploy police to handle the situation.

I mean, after all this time, no one has thought of using solar backed traffic lights? No, no one? Humph.

In the scheme of things, a 12-hour power outage may not seem so bad, especially considering when our CARICOM cousins who have been hit by hurricanes have gone for days without electricity.

The difference is our sister islands’ outages were a direct result of natural disasters, they still had cell service and they had meaningful thought out communication from their leaders. Their government-run utilities and services had contingency plans.

We had nothing but rumours, speculation, silence, traffic and dry pipes.

Dry pipes, because those geniuses at the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) never saw it fit to outfit their station pumps with generators? Then again it’s WASA, so no one is shocked there.

Bmobile, ya’ll need to get your act together. The fact that your system went completely berserk and left thousands of your customers without service is completely ridiculous. Digicel was up and running, but you failed us big time.

I tend to be a disaster zone of a human, so during the blackout, I was plagued with hypothetical thoughts of what would happen if, let’s say, I fell down and knocked myself out, my two children would have no way of calling for help… trust me I’ve drilled them should that situation ever arise. No 999 or calls to their father, they would have to run to a neighbour’s house and hope someone is home, while their mother slowly fades into a coma that she may never wake from. Thanks Bmoblie for making my children orphans.

Now back to reality.

The economic impact of the blackout may never quite be fully known, but I assure those few hours of no electricity and no word on when it would be back hurt a number of small businesses.

Now I’ve heard people say that business owners should not complain over losing a few hundred dollars of sales, but to many small businesses, a few hundred dollars is the difference between staying open and closing, the difference between keeping a full staff or having to let people go.

Think of all the small parlours that service small and rural communities, whose chillers went out causing food spoilage. Small restaurants and food establishments had to give away cooked or precooked food, costing them thousands.

Then we had security concerns. Our Ministry of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds may be proudly patting himself on the back, but for what, many of us do not know. There were a considerable amount of reports of small robberies that took place and with phone lines down many citizens were sitting ducks to the criminally minded.

While there was a police presence, it took way too long for them to be deployed.

The Government has initiated an investigation into the blackout, but as always it’s a little too late. Why must we wait for a disaster to happen before we get things in order.

We continuously suffer the effects of short term thinking, band-aid solutions and no emergency plans.

Another day in the land of backwards ever and forward never.

Don’t expect much from that inquiry, no heads will roll, no apologies will be made and those in power will hope we soon forget.

In the meantime, if anyone knows anywhere that’s having a sale on generators hit your girl up, cause I have little faith that this donkey show won’t repeat itself.