Let there be light at the end of the tunnel
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
April 19, 2004
MORE than a quarter-century ago, New Yorkers were plunged into darkness on a sweltering night that sent looters into a frenzy and left the city teetering near anarchy.
On July 13, 1977, New York City and its northern suburbs lost all electrical power. It was the second time in 12 years that that had happened - the first was in 1965 - and it was to happen again on August 13, 2003.
The 1977 blackout lasted 25 hours and forced New Yorkers to endure what Mayor Abraham Beame later called "a night of terror" - a night in which more than 1,700 stores across the city had been looted or damaged and more than 3,000 people arrested. Property damage estimates were as high as $150 million.
It began when a burst of lightning knocked out Consolidated Edison's power lines in Westchester County. Alternate power sources weren't tapped in time and by 9.36 pm about 8 million people were without electricity.
Before midnight, civil disturbances were raging in all five boroughs and looting had erupted in several neighbourhoods. Hardest hit was Brooklyn's Bushwick section, where one-third of the 143 stores on a 30-block stretch suffered fire damage."
Nothing as horrific as this AP story depicted happened in Guyana when, on the very night of July 12, 1977, the grid of the Guyana Electricity Corporation lost its power, plunging the Guyanese coastland into darkness.
In the state in which Guyana had spiralled under the Burnham administration there is no way that the lawlessness in New York that followed that city's blackout could have been duplicated here. Nonetheless, the state media at that time gave as much prominence to New York's lightening-inflicted outage as it did the GEC's power failure. The presumption was that agonized consumers would find solace in the regime's failure to heed a Lionel Luckhoo warning, that a power catastrophe would descend upon the country unless it focused immediate attention on rehabilitating or replacing GEC's transmission network.
Even after Mr. Desmond Hoyte took over the presidency on Forbes Burnham's death in 1985 - eight years after the 1977 outage, we didn't seem to get it. In the height of the blackouts and scheduled load shedding, a team of the Hoyte administration led by then Deputy Prime Minister Robert Corbin opted to buy a touted 10-megawatt power barge from Miami at a cost of some US$3 million, instead of a generating set that the Government of Italy was offering for US$2.8 million.
After months of failing to churn out more than 4 megawatts of power at any one time, the power barge blew up! Yet, a report commissioned by the regime found no one "criminally" responsible for the fiasco, that resulted in Guyanese being US$3 million poorer and no nearer to finding relief from the blackouts.
Today, after years of improvement, we're back in load-shedding mode. Yet, this is just the time we need all the electricity that can be generated if the nation is to accomplish the goals that the just-approved National Budget has set for fiscal 2004.
Our economy is going to continue to suffer from production-sector downsizing if there isn't enough power to maximize output capacity. Hopefully, the Government's planned spending on energy this year will cater for the retooling of the country's power generating network, as well as the hot pursuit of alternative sources of electricity.
Let there be light at the end of the tunnel - and the end of this blackout journey should be 2004.