标签： Bahamas

Nearly one month after a devastating plane crash claimed 10 lives during the Bahamas’ Independence Day celebrations, families of the victims are trapped in extended anguish, marked by the first funeral held on Saturday and an incomplete memorial held without a loved one’s remains.

In Nicholls Town on the island of Andros, hundreds of mourners packed the local Church of Christ to lay 24-year-old Macaro Rolle to rest, the first of the 10 crash victims to be buried. Rolle was one of the initial survivors of the crash, but ultimately succumbed to his injuries three hours after impact – a window of time that allowed him to say final goodbyes to his family and leave a lasting testimony of his deep Christian faith.

Rolle, who owned his own home by age 24, had built a reputation as a disciplined, reliable worker over seven years of employment at MSC Ocean Cay, where he missed only a single day of work. “That speaks about his character. That speaks about his legacy and life at MSC Ocean Cay,” said Anna Albury, the resort’s human resources manager. The company covered travel costs for more than 20 employees to attend the funeral and brought in professional grief counselors to support staff following the disaster.

Friends and relatives shared warm memories of Rolle’s consistent faith, recalling he would pray even before eating a small snack like a potato chip or piece of candy. In his final hours waiting for rescue, he called repeatedly on the name of Jesus. His aunt Linda Rolle noted that the three hours of survival after the crash gave his family a small measure of closure his counterparts in other bereaved families have yet to receive. “It’s not easy but I want to encourage my family today to know that God is faithful, just to keep him alive to bring closure to the other family members but most of all to leave a testimony. That’s important. We serve a faithful God,” she said.

Close family members shared poignant reminders of their final interactions before the fateful flight. One cousin recalled receiving Rolle’s room key just hours before takeoff, with plans to meet up later. “That’s the very same key I had to use later to pack up his things and bring it home,” he said, his grief raw weeks after the crash. Rolle was remembered as a loving sibling, loyal friend, avid fisherman and joke-teller who dedicated himself to helping others. His former high school classmates honored his memory by gifting his family a custom portrait, while local lawmaker Leonardo Lightbourne sent official condolences via a representative after being unable to attend.

Meanwhile, 40 kilometers away in New Providence, dozens of family members and friends gathered at Kingdom Evangelistic Apostolic Ministries for a memorial service for Rashad Storr – a member of the popular Da Pond Band and a mechanic for Western Air. Like several other victims, Storr’s remains have not been recovered and returned to his family due to severe burn damage that has complicated identification efforts, which currently rely on DNA testing to confirm victims’ identities. Even as speakers celebrated Storr’s life, the absence of his body hung over the entire service, with his relatives saying they will not find closure until his remains are returned.

Attendees wore dark green and gold to honor Storr, remembering his warmth as a musician, his generosity toward others, and his dedication to his craft. Bandmate Shaniese Miller said Storr’s kindness to everyone he met earned him the nickname “the great Rashad” long before the crash. “Not because he asked to be call that but because there was something truly great about the way he treated people,” Miller said. Friend Phil Rolle described Storr as a chosen brother who taught him to play guitar and always showed up for people in need. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good on the guitar as him but I have to keep the legacy going,” he said.

Western Air manager Ricardo Wilson also paid tribute to Storr’s work ethic, noting “He came to our organisation as an employee but he left as family.”

Alongside Rolle and Storr, the eight other victims of the crash include Da Pond Band leader Giovanni McKenzie, band members Mateo Winder, Toniquea Gilot and Tra’vis Johnson, popular DJ Melvin “DJ Fresh International” Henfield, Andros native Quintin Myers, lead pilot Franklyn Cambridge, and 16-year-old Nicholas Oliver Jr. As families continue to wait for identification results to bring their loved ones home, the dual services on Saturday highlighted the prolonged pain bereaved relatives continue to endure weeks after the tragedy.

A catastrophic infrastructure failure left the entire island of New Providence, Bahamas, without power for seven hours or longer in some communities yesterday, triggering widespread disruption to daily life, travel and healthcare while reviving long-simmering public fury over exorbitant energy costs and chronically unreliable service from national utility Bahamas Power and Light (BPL).

The outage struck abruptly at approximately 1:45 a.m., right in the middle of the night when temperatures remain dangerously high and residents are most dependent on cooling systems. BPL officials quickly traced the blackout to an explosion of a 15MVA transformer at the Blue Hills Primary substation, which they say was initiated by an underground cable fault. Footage released by the utility showed critical equipment completely engulfed in flames before firefighting crews were able to extinguish the blaze.

With no air conditioning to counter stifling overnight heat, thousands of residents were forced to flee their homes in search of cooler conditions. A field report from the Tribune found residents huddled along shorelines with blankets and pillows, chasing the faint ocean breeze, while others opted for early morning swims to beat the heat. Roads were unusually congested in the pre-dawn hours, and many residents slept inside their running cars with fogged windows, evidence of hours spent waiting out the outage. Gas station parking lots also became informal gathering spots for groups seeking vehicle-powered cooling. Multiple residents reported waking up completely soaked through with sweat as indoor temperatures climbed overnight.

Public frustration boiled over quickly on BPL’s social media channels, where hundreds of customers flooded comment sections with complaints. Many condemned the utility for repeatedly failing to deliver consistent service, even as customers are forced to pay some of the highest electricity rates in the region. “Hours after they sent those crazy bills, a night of darkness and sweat…what are we paying for?” one Facebook user wrote. Another commented: “It seems completely unfair to be paying hefty bills and melting in the heat. You want the customers to be patient but the scales are tipped in your favour.” Calls for systemic change were widespread, with some residents demanding full privatization of BPL and others pushing for the introduction of open competition to the Bahamian electricity sector.

The disruption extended far beyond residential areas, upending commercial operations and travel across the island. Fast food chains faced delayed openings and extended customer wait times after many hourly employees were unable to arrive for their shifts on schedule. At Lynden Pindling International Airport, the outage knocked out main internet services, halting international check-in processes for Bahamasair and triggering long queues at check-in counters. Airport operations switched over to backup generator power and a reserve internet connection to resolve delays, with full service restored shortly after 8 a.m. when main power returned. Princess Margaret Hospital, the island’s main public medical facility, avoided major disruption, with officials reporting only minor temperature fluctuations that did not impact patient care.

Bahamas Energy Minister JoBeth Coleby-Davis publicly acknowledged the widespread anger caused by the outage, confirming that a high-voltage system fault destroyed one of the network’s primary transformers. She explained that the explosion caused a flashover, which required crews to isolate critical equipment to protect both on-site workers and the broader electricity grid. Once the system was secured and stabilized, BPL crews launched a complex “black start” restoration process, one of the most technically challenging operations an energy provider can undertake. The process requires bringing generation units online in a carefully controlled sequence, then progressively energizing substations and restoring power to customer areas in stages, with every step coordinated in real time between control room staff, generation facilities, substation teams and field crews.

Coleby-Davis also extended recognition to the BPL workers who led the restoration effort, noting that many crews worked nonstop through grueling conditions just days after the utility lost a valued colleague to recent death. “While I fully understand the frustration experienced by households and business, I also wish to express my sincere thanks to the dedicated men and women of BPL,” she said.

The outage quickly became a political flashpoint, with Free National Movement (FNM) leader Michael Pintard placing full blame for the crisis on the ruling Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) Davis administration. Pintard rejected recent claims from PLP chairman Fred Mitchell that blamed the current infrastructure problems on decisions made by the previous FNM administration. He countered that the current administration canceled a major infrastructure contract with Finnish firm Wärtsilä, terminated development contracts for the critical Station A power facility and took multiple functioning generators offline during its tenure. Pintard argued that the FNM had returned disabled generators to service and stabilized the national transmission and distribution network during its time in office. “What’s the bottom line? What accounts for the chaos that we now are experiencing with BPL? The PLP,” he said. “They have had carte blanche—In other words, nobody has been able to interrupt what they have done in terms of privatizing BPL—and yet they have not been able to provide cleaner power, more affordable power, or worst of all, consistent power for the Bahamian people.”

Power restoration began in phases, with some areas regaining service as early as 6:30 a.m., and service gradually extended to most communities throughout the day. But the crisis did not end once main power was restored. BPL immediately announced temporary rotational blackouts for parts of western New Providence to prevent further strain on the grid, warning customers of scheduled outages between 1 p.m. yesterday and 1 a.m. today. The utility also confirmed it was responding to multiple separate minor outages across the island yesterday, though it has not yet released details on the cause of each additional incident.

A total island-wide power outage that brought daily life across New Providence to a standstill has sparked intense public scrutiny of the Davis administration’s energy policy, just weeks after officials insisted the national utility was fully prepared to meet peak summer demand. The shutdown, triggered by an electrical fire at Bahamas Power and Light (BPL)’s Blue Hills Power Station, left thousands of residents trapped in sweltering, unairconditioned homes, forced business closures, and disrupted commercial air travel through Nassau’s major airport.

In a press briefing held hours after power was cut, Prime Minister Philip Davis pushed back against critics who have pinned the blame for the outage on poor infrastructure maintenance or insufficient action by his administration. He framed the incident as the result of uncontrollable external factors, pointing to record-breaking regional heat that has strained the Bahamas’ already outdated electricity network beyond its designed limits.

According to preliminary findings from BPL, an undetermined fault in an underground cable sparked a fire that damaged a 15 MVA transformer, triggering a cascading failure that shut down generation at both the Blue Hills and Clifton Pier power stations. Investigations into the root cause of the initial cable fault are still ongoing, with no definitive conclusion reached as of the briefing.

Davis pushed back against claims of human error or institutional neglect, asking: “You have a transformer that’s blown up because of overheating of underground cables, was that man’s fault? The excessive heat, the record heat that we are experiencing over the last several months. May, for example, was the hottest in history. June — same thing.” He added that persistent extreme temperatures have overwhelmed the country’s aging transmission and distribution network, which his administration inherited when it took office.

The Prime Minister also revealed long-standing systemic gaps that have complicated infrastructure maintenance and incident response: decades of institutional turnover at BPL and its predecessor, the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, have left the utility without a complete centralized inventory mapping the location of all underground cables, erasing critical institutional knowledge of the national grid.

Davis warned Bahamians to brace for additional power disruptions in the coming months as the government undertakes a sweeping overhaul of BPL’s outdated infrastructure, much of which has already reached the end of its planned service life. “There will be growing pains to get to where we need to be because of what we inherited,” he said. “Incidents like these remind us of the state of play of BPL.”

To address public anger over the outage, Davis confirmed he has directed BPL leadership to explore potential financial concessions for residential and commercial customers affected by the shutdown, with the utility set to announce what relief it can offer in the coming days.

He also pushed back against claims that the crisis is a unique failure of Bahamian governance, noting that power grid disruptions linked to extreme heat have become increasingly common across the globe. Still, he stressed that his administration is prioritizing aggressive grid modernization, pointing to ongoing transmission and distribution upgrades, new substation construction, and a major renewable energy project at the Blue Hills site that will add 20 megawatts of solar generation and 25 megawatts of battery storage once completed.

BPL’s top leadership has echoed Davis’s framing, while acknowledging gaps in the utility’s contingency response and apologizing to the public. Chief Operating Officer Anthony Christie suggested the underground cable likely had an undiagnosed pre-existing fault that was exacerbated by extreme peak electrical demand amid the heat wave, triggering a chain reaction that damaged nearby cables as well. He denied that poor maintenance contributed to the incident, though he confirmed the full investigation is still ongoing.

Executive Chair Christina Alston acknowledged in a formal statement that BPL’s contingency plans have clear limits when multiple critical failures occur in close succession. “That is not an excuse. It is the reality we’re confronting — and responsibility we understand,” she said, adding that public trust can only be restored through tangible, measurable improvements to service reliability and communication, not just verbal assurances.

BPL Chief Executive Officer Toni Pratt offered a public apology to New Providence residents, acknowledging the severe discomfort the outage caused during a period of extreme heat. “We know that it is very, very hot, and we understand your frustration. We are working as safely and as quickly as we possibly can to restore supply,” she said. As of the latest updates, power has been systematically restored to most parts of the island, though limited outages persist in some areas while final repairs are completed.

Bahamas Grid Company Chief Operating Officer Ryan Holder said repair crews began assessing the damaged transformer overnight, with total repair work projected to take between eight and ten hours. Crews have been working around live energized infrastructure to excavate the affected area, install new protective conduit, and lay replacement transmission cable.

This outage marks one of the worst summer power outage events the Bahamas has seen in a decade, an issue that has become a key political measuring stick for sitting administrations, renewing public pressure on the Davis government to deliver on its promises of grid reliability.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, a widespread blackout cut power to the entire island of New Providence, Bahamas, after an underground cable fault sparked a transformer explosion and subsequent electrical fire at the Blue Hills Power Station, according to official updates from Bahamas Power and Light (BPL), the territory’s primary electricity provider.

The utility company issued its first public alert regarding the outage at approximately 4:00 a.m., confirming that the incident at the generation facility had led to a total loss of electricity service across all of New Providence. Preliminary engineering investigations launched immediately after the incident traced the root cause to an suspected fault in an underground transmission cable, which triggered the blast that destroyed a 15-megavolt-ampere (MVA) transformer at the station and ignited the resulting electrical fire.

Emergency response teams quickly contained the blaze, extinguishing it safely before any additional damage to the facility or injuries to personnel were reported. Immediately after the fire was put out, specialized BPL repair and grid restoration teams were deployed to begin bringing the system back online. Initially, the company warned customers that it could not provide a definitive timeline for full service restoration, given the extent of the damage caused by the explosion.

Just two hours after the initial outage was reported, by 6:00 a.m., BPL confirmed that staged grid restoration work was well underway. To protect grid integrity and prevent a secondary collapse, service was brought back to communities incrementally rather than restoring all power at once. The first neighborhoods to regain service included Bonita Bay, SC McPherson, Winton 1 and 2, and Harold Road, alongside portions of Yellow Elder and Stapleton Gardens.

Within 30 minutes of that update, the company added more restored communities to the list: the popular tourist hub Paradise Island was brought back online, along with East Street South, South Beach Estates, Pinewood, Marshall Road, Bamboo Town, Fox Hill Road, and sections of the Prince Charles neighborhood. By 7:00 a.m., service had also been restored to Gladstone Road, Firetrail Road, and portions of Carmichael Road and Sears Road.

In BPL’s latest public update, issued at 7:18 a.m., just three hours and 18 minutes after the initial outage was declared, the company confirmed that approximately 50 percent of all New Providence electricity customers had already had their service restored. Restoration teams remain on site across the island working around the clock to restore power to the remaining affected customers as quickly as possible, while prioritizing worker and public safety throughout the process.

BPL has issued a public appeal for customers who remain without power in areas that have been officially listed as restored: those customers are asked to contact the company’s 24-hour customer call centre at 225-5275 to report their individual outages so crews can address localized issues. In a closing statement, the utility apologized to all customers for the major service disruption and extended its gratitude to the public for their patience as the final stages of restoration continue.

A devastating workplace accident has shaken the tight-knit community of Grand Cay in the Bahamas, where a 35-year-old Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) employee and small business owner died from electrocution while on the job Tuesday evening.

Lawrence Cooper, who had served BPL for more than five years and ran his own ferry service on the island, was performing maintenance on a high-voltage utility pole shortly before 9 p.m. when the incident occurred. First responders rushed the injured worker to Grand Cay’s local clinic, but he was pronounced dead just an hour after arriving at the facility.

The sudden loss has left Cooper’s family and neighbors reeling, with his uncle Maxwell Cooper describing the tragedy as an unexpected blow. Maxwell, who raised Lawrence and taught him most of his technical skills while the pair lived in the same family compound for years, spoke to local outlet The Tribune while waiting to transport his nephew’s remains off the island. “Everybody liked him. The whole community liked him. He was a nice boy. He liked boats,” Maxwell shared, noting that the entire community is struggling to process the sudden passing.

In an official statement released the day after the incident, BPL confirmed that formal investigations into the fatal accident are already underway, and offered its full condolences to Cooper’s family, friends, and colleagues. The utility company added that it is prioritizing support for affected staff and will release further details as the investigation progresses. Energy Minister JoBeth Coleby-Davis also announced that BPL CEO Toni Pratt will lead an official delegation to Abaco to meet with on-island staff and coordinate support for the team in Grand Cay. “We remain deeply grateful to BPL’s teams for continued dedication to restoring electricity for consumers. However, this tragedy serves as a reminder that the safety and security of our employees must remain our highest priority,” the minister said.

Kirk Cornish, the Member of Parliament for North Abaco, echoed the national mood of mourning, remembering Cooper as a deeply dedicated public servant. “This tragedy was a solemn reminder of the risks faced by the men and women who work daily to keep the country’s electricity system running,” Cornish said. “As we mourn this heartbreaking loss, let us keep his family and all who knew and loved him in our thoughts and prayers.”

Cooper’s death marks the second fatal electrocution in the Bahamas in the span of just one month, and it comes amid a growing string of deadly workplace accidents across the country that have reignited widespread public concern over national industrial safety standards. Just one week prior to the Grand Cay incident, 68-year-old painter and contractor John Walkes was killed by electrocution while working at the Bimini Blue Water Marina, when he made accidental contact with energized high-voltage equipment.

For Ingrid Francois, a rainy Sunday morning in July began like any other. When bad weather derailed her 27-year-old son Antonio Cartwright’s usual skateboard commute to his job, she offered him a ride, still with no idea that it would be the final time she would see him alive. Four days later, her worst fears were confirmed when Cartwright’s body was discovered hanging from a tree in dense brush near Hacio Point Close, in what authorities are investigating as a suspected suicide.

The tragedy has sparked sharp questions from Francois about both law enforcement’s handling of her missing person report and the quality of mental health care her son received in the months before his death. Cartwright, a hardworking and ambitious painter with a side business planning event decorations, had received a formal schizophrenia diagnosis earlier in 2024. Just two days before he vanished, he attended a routine psychiatric appointment that left Francois deeply unsettled about the direction of his treatment.

According to the official missing person filing, Cartwright was last spotted around 8:30 a.m. on July 19 at his workplace, CBS Bahamas, located in Southwest Plaza. His typical routine after work saw him clock out at 5:30 p.m. and make the 30-minute skateboard trip home. When he failed to arrive that evening and did not respond to repeated calls and texts, Francois knew something was wrong. She immediately filed a missing person report with local police, but walked away frustrated when officers told her the official search process would not begin for another 24 hours.

“I told them he’d already been missing for 25 hours,” Francois said in an interview. “Y’all have to move faster than that.” Beyond the initial delay, Francois claims that law enforcement failed to follow through on critical information she provided that could have led to an earlier discovery of her son’s body. She told officers that Cartwright often spoke about the brush-lined track road where his body was eventually found, and explicitly urged them to search the dense vegetation along the route. But according to Francois, officers only drove past the area on Monday and never actually entered the bushes to conduct a thorough search.

It was not until last Thursday that the search ended with the grim discovery: Cartwright’s nephew, part of a family search party that returned to the area after police called off their initial sweep, ventured into the brush and found the body. The young man remained on scene in a state of shock until other relatives called him out of the vegetation.

To his mother, Cartwright was far more than a statistics on a missing person list or a name in a tragedy report. He was a driven, creative young man constantly chasing new opportunities to build a better life. A skilled commercial painter, he regularly took on high-risk jobs scaling the exterior walls of tall buildings to complete work — once sending his mother a photo taken from such a great height that pedestrians on the ground looked no bigger than ants.

Never content to stick to one line of work, Cartwright was also building his own small business renting decorative lighting for parties and special events, choosing to carve out a niche separate from the more common balloon decoration ventures that dominate the local market. Just days before his disappearance, he asked his mother for a power drill to work on another new side project. But Francois said her son’s string of entrepreneurial ventures had hit a series of devastating setbacks in recent months, leaving him struggling to regain his financial footing.

“He started to do a lot of different jobs and everything crumbled,” Francois said. “To get back on his feet, I think it was a struggle, and he probably didn’t want to face all of that.” Even after his schizophrenia diagnosis earlier this year, Cartwright remained determined to keep working and pursue his goals, a resilience his mother remembers fondly. It was the Friday before his disappearance that the family attended the troubling medical appointment, where providers discussed adjusting the frequency of Cartwright’s medication. Francois left the appointment deeply unhappy with the interaction, and says she plans to launch a private review of what transpired during the visit.

“That session was not good and that’s something I’m going to look into because I didn’t like the session at all,” she said. She questioned why medical staff did not take more urgent action when Cartwright displayed signs of irrational speech during the appointment, noting that she left the meeting with a deep sense of unease that something bad would happen.

That Sunday rain that led Francois to drive her son to work ended up giving the pair one last unexpected moment together. She fixed him breakfast before the drive, and as she dropped him off, she reminded him not to fill up on snacks before she made dinner that evening. “I said, ‘Antonio, don’t eat anything heavy. Mommy’s going to cook today,’” she recalled. “But this time, he didn’t say anything back.”

Francois now sees that rainy morning as a final gift, giving her one last chance to care for her son before he died. She also views the way he left his skateboard, propped neatly against the family lawn, as a quiet farewell, a sign that he had found peace in his final moments. Even weeks after the tragedy, she says she still struggles to process what happened. “To this day, I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I feel like he could walk through the door, but I know he’s gone.”