When staff at Tukka West arrived for work Monday morning they found the lights out, the fridges off and the ice cream starting to melt in the freezers.
After a few frantic calls to CUC, business owner Ron Hargrave was informed it was a planned outage in West Bay that could last for the entire day.
“I am livid,” he told the Compass Monday.
“We have had to close the restaurant for the day.”
Fuelling his frustration, said Hargrave, was the absence of any prior warning that the scheduled outage was going to happen.
There was no email, no note on the door, no call from a company representative – all standard procedures when the water company, for example, has a service interruption.
“It turns out their policy for disconnecting over 100 homes and businesses is to put it on the radio,” said Hargrave, relaying the message he was given by a customer service representatives.
Scheduled outages are not uncommon, to allow maintenance on the network. But Hargrave and other business owners in the area said they are baffled as to why they wouldn’t be given direct notice.
“I get my bills on email, so I don’t know why they couldn’t have emailed me about this,” said Billy Farrington, of Marine Diesel and Industrial.
The unexpected outage left him scrambling to locate a generator at the start of the day Monday.
He said he had spoken to other business owners in the area and none was aware that an outage was planned. There was no obvious message about the outage on CUC’s Facebook page either.
At Calypso Grill, the restaurant was closed for the day, but staff were scrambled to deal with refrigeration issues once news of the power outage was relayed.
In response to questions from the Compass, a CUC spokesperson said the outage was advertised on the radio and through notifications to media houses.
“CUC apologises for the inconvenience caused to customers for this outage and will endeavour to ensure customers are notified directly in the future,” she said in an email.
Hargrave said it had been fortunate, for him, that it was a slower day on the cruise front. If a Royal Caribbean ship had been in port, he said he would have had hundreds of bookings.
“What would I say to 300 people who were expecting lunch? Sorry my power got turned off? What does that say about our tourism product – sadly nothing good.”
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I listen to 96.5 Cayrock most works days working from home. I did not here one such notification or a power outage for West Bay at all on the radio all of last week.
This is unacceptable. Business Owners need to be able to prepare and plan for outages. CUC should be held accountable. The work should also have been done between 1am – 5am to minimize impact.
The Water Authority did the same a week last Sunday to over 100 homes off Bobby Thompson Way in GT. It seems the only “notification” was a Facebook post the day before notifying that water would be off between 8am and 3pm. Water was actually cut off at 7.30 and restored at 3.30. Similarly, customers registered for online billing were not notified by email, and every person I spoke with was not aware in advance. The customer service of our utilities companies is falling well short at present,
This was notified everyday last week on Radio Cayman.
I think all the big businesses should have a back-up generator, so there would be no panic if the electricity is turned off; a lot of homes these days have back-up generators, large enough to accommodate our most important appliances, at least. I also keep a few bottles of water at all times in case the water is turned off. This is hurricane season, let us be prepared!
Maybe it’s time for a government enquiry into the CUC. The organization seems unconcerned with the welfare of rate payers and focussed only on making money. It’s not an acceptable way to run a public utility. Maybe time for new leadership.