A lightning strike that sparked an explosion at the Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) Blue Hills Power Station has amplified already simmering public fury over a summer plagued by persistent electricity failures, leaving wide swathes of New Providence — including residential neighborhoods, commercial establishments, major tourist resorts, the national airport, and critical sections of Princess Margaret Hospital — grappling with cascading service disruptions. Opposition critics have pinned the ongoing crisis squarely on the Davis administration’s failure to address systemic flaws in the country’s energy infrastructure.
Dr. Andre Rollins, the opposition’s Shadow Minister for Energy, Utilities and Aviation, has launched sharp criticism of the government’s handling of the electricity sector, pointing to a recent public statement by Energy Minister JoBeth Coleby-Davis that BPL held sufficient generation capacity to meet peak summer demand.
“Less than a month after that assurance, the entire country, and New Providence in particular, is besieged by catastrophic, daily power outages that sometimes stretch on for hours on end,” Rollins said in a statement following Sunday’s incident.
The blast, which struck shortly after 10 a.m. on Sunday, knocked out power across dozens of communities on New Providence, launching BPL maintenance crews into a 24-hour battle to restore service that saw intermittent restoration, secondary failures, and gradual reconnection as technicians worked to stabilize the overstressed grid. BPL Energy Supply Director Jeffery Davis confirmed the disruption was triggered by severe lightning activity in the Blue Hills area.
“At 10:06 a.m., amid reports of intense lightning in the region, a system disturbance knocked out all generation capacity at Blue Hills Power Station, and impacted additional generation infrastructure at the Clifton Pier Power Station. After the site was cleared as safe, we received reports of an explosion at the 33 kv Substation B on the Blue Hills campus,” Davis explained.
Inspection teams identified a severe fault on the Earnest Street South Circuit connected to Substation B, and crews immediately launched repair and restoration work. Ongoing upgrades to BPL’s main transmission interconnector initially delayed the delivery of auxiliary power to the Blue Hills facility to jumpstart generation, Davis added, but technicians were eventually able to reroute power through an alternative circuit to begin bringing the plant’s assets back online.
User-shared videos circulating on social media platforms purported to show thick smoke billowing from the power station compound in the immediate aftermath of the strike.
By Sunday afternoon, BPL announced that approximately 60 percent of affected customers on New Providence had regained power. Initial restoration had brought service back to roughly 50 percent of Blue Hills Power Station’s customer base, but secondary system disturbances forced the plant offline again while crews worked to isolate the fault on the Earnest Street South Circuit. Later in the day, technicians reported that the Windsor Field 1 generation unit also tripped offline, cutting power to additional communities including Venetian West, Albany, Western Medical Center, the corridor from Orange Hill to Old Fort Bay, and North and South Westridge.
Shortly before 6 p.m. Sunday, BPL confirmed that Substation B at Blue Hills had been successfully re-energized around 5:30 p.m. Full restoration work remained ongoing at press time, with crews gradually reconnected areas incrementally to protect grid stability, and no estimated timeline for full service recovery was provided.
The outage rippled through key sectors of Bahamian society, hitting commercial and tourism operations particularly hard. A guest staying at Atlantis Paradise Island’s Royal Towers posted online that they and their young toddler were trapped in a malfunctioning elevator for roughly 45 minutes during the blackout.
“None of the buttons worked, not even the emergency alarm,” the guest recalled. “We called multiple contact numbers listed on the resort website, and as you’d expect, many were just call centers with no direct line to on-site staff. Thirty minutes after we got stuck, other guests walking past heard us and called for help immediately.”
“I’m grateful to the maintenance staff who got us out — they had to pry open the elevator and pull us through a small gap at the bottom. It was an incredibly scary experience for my toddler. I’m extremely disappointed with how this was handled,” they added.
Another guest claimed power was still out at portions of the resort as of 6 p.m., and that some restaurants were turning away guests with confirmed reservations. “Every meal for current guests should be free after this. It just keeps getting worse,” the guest wrote.
An Atlantis spokesperson later clarified that the BPL outage did cause one of the resort’s backup generators to fail, leading to temporary elevator disruptions, but disputed claims that restaurant service was impacted. The spokesperson added that all resort operations returned to normal within two hours of the initial outage.
Representatives from the Nassau Airport Development Company confirmed that Lynden Pindling International Airport’s air conditioning systems suffered power-related disruptions on both Saturday and Sunday morning. “Maintenance teams worked both Saturday and Sunday to restore the cooling system, and the airport is now operating normally with full cooling,” the representative said.
The most recent outage unleashed a wave of public frustration on social media, from residents already exhausted by months of summer blackouts and sweltering Bahamian heat. “I might as well just unplug my fridge, because by the time BPL gets done fixing this, I’m going to have to buy a new one anyway,” one user wrote. Another commented: “For BPL to do this right after I paid my full bill yesterday? That’s insane.” A third added: “BPL sends everyone double-sized bills then turns the whole island’s power off? I love it here… said no one.”
Sunday’s disruption follows widespread outages across parts of New Providence on Friday, when the Public Hospitals Authority issued an alert that Princess Margaret Hospital’s entire Medical Block, including the critical Dialysis Unit, had lost power. Rollins pointed to that incident to highlight the life-threatening impacts of the government’s inaction.
“What excuse does the minister have for these blackouts this time? Power losses at Princess Margaret Hospital have left staff unable to provide life-sustaining dialysis to patients, and small businesses without backup generators can’t even process credit card transactions,” Rollins said. “Bahamians who can’t afford to buy their own generators are stuck suffering in the sweltering heat in their homes, or forced to drive around on pothole-ridden roads just to cool down. Even businesses and facilities that do have generators can’t maintain consistent power because of how often the grid goes down.”
Rollins also renewed longstanding opposition criticism of the Davis administration’s energy reform agenda, noting that the creation of the Bahamas Grid Company was supposed to deliver the reliable service consumers were promised. “We were told that selling BPL’s grid assets to the new Bahamas Grid Company would bring consistent, reliable power, and that load shedding would be a thing of the past,” he said. He also questioned sharp increases in customer energy costs, citing widespread complaints from households receiving far higher bills than in previous years.
Rollins called on the Davis administration to come clean with the Bahamian people about the full scope of generation, transmission and distribution failures driving the repeated outages. “Has the government’s public relations around BPL crossed into outright fabrication, making up excuses as they go along? Minister Coleby-Davis needs to tell the public the truth, and stop trying to fool Bahamians who are suffering because of this government’s neglect and massive incompetence,” he said.
Last month, while Coleby-Davis did confirm BPL held enough generation capacity to meet summer demand, she did warn that temporary power interruptions could be expected as the utility carries out large-scale infrastructure upgrades across New Providence.