Dear ABIC Members,

I had a meeting yesterday with Garry Madeiros and Vince Ingham, at their request, in order to get a better feel for what happened last week and the implications for all of us on a going forward basis.

Garry & Vince realize that there is a need for greater communication on the recent events, but they are understandably deeply involved with the restoration process and are waiting for feedback from the investigators in order to provide further information to business and the community.

What I learned was that they are now coping with the demand, even though one of their power plants, which is just behind the two switch rooms that – were destroyed, is basically sitting idle whilst thye try and restore the cabling and switching systems.

What this does mean is that even if the fire had consumed this plant, the two other power plant sites, which are physically seperate, would be utilized to restore power. As an aside, it appears that one of the station generators did fail to start when the back up process was instituted, despite being subjected to regular tests. BELCO have addressed this issue and the engine is now in service.

There is clearly much more detail to come and I am certainly not quailified to provide it despite finding out more about switches, megawatts and switch boards in the last few days then I ever needed to know. What I think I learned, however, is that despite the catastrophic nature of this event, losing 2 switch rooms out of a total of 5, we were still some way from a long term black out which is, of course, the main concern. Their objective was to reassure our members that BELCO has a number of back up systems and ways to supply power to the City.

I believe we should wait to hear from BELCO over the next few days and should avoid jumping to conclusions or forming opinions based on some of the public conjecture, much of which is clearly uninformed. BELCO clearly already had some of these issues addressed in their long term planning and I am sure they will have learned a lot more from the incident.

I have stressed to Garry & Vince that ths event has clearly caused great concern in the business community and that we will all be looking for some clear explanations and guidance so that we can take the proper steps in our Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery procedures.

Yours truly,

David Ezekiel
Chairman