Dear BP,
Sunday, 5th July 2026, will go down in history as one of the most consequential events in the history of Bahamas Power and Light (BPL). On that day, the BPL technical staff braved fire, personal injury, and other hazards to restore power to a generation grid that had ceased operating. Just as a reminder, let’s outline briefly what happened:
“The 33 kV switchgear failure is a high‑magnitude fault at a major node in New Providence’s grid. When Blue Hills—one of the island’s primary generation and distribution hubs—suddenly goes offline, the remaining stations cannot instantly stabilise the load. This creates cascading trips across feeders, resulting in an island‑wide blackout.”
No human error, just Force Majeure (Act of God) in its purest manifestation. One would have thought those persons tasked with BPL communications and Public Relations (PR) would have animated themselves by the afternoon of the day and had clear, unequivocal messaging prepared for the Minister and the government outlining the true nature of the outage, but that would be asking these people to put aside their Sunday activities and do the work I am told they are paid bundles of public funds to perform.
What actually occurred was a series of disjointed statements that not only lacked clarity but also enabled opponents of the government to craft messages that damaged the Minister’s credibility and gave rise to false, self-serving messaging. Whoever is in charge of BPL corporate messaging clearly, profoundly, and disastrously forgot their mission.
As a reminder to them, A PR unit manages media relations, crisis communication, content and messaging, stakeholder engagement, public sentiment monitoring, and internal communication, all aimed at sustaining a positive public image. PR units prepare for and manage crises—anything from scandals to operational failures. They craft statements, coordinate messaging, and act quickly to protect the organisation’s reputation.
None of these vital PR responsibilities appears to have been carried out effectively. In fact, the Minister was placed in a position where she appeared to have apologised for an event, an act of God over which she had no control. To add insult to injury, since Monday, the news media have been awash with misinformation. Indeed, to follow their narratives, one might conclude that the Honourable Minister personally called in a lightning strike on BPL power-generating equipment.
This misinformation resonates with people and will continue to be amplified by some until a clear, unequivocal message finally emerges from BPL’s communication unit. What BPL is witnessing is a textbook example of poor crisis-management communication. Poor crisis‑management messaging doesn’t just “look bad.” It produces predictable, measurable, and often irreversible damage across financial, reputational, regulatory, and internal dimensions. The consequences are well documented in recent research and align closely with what you would have seen in high-stakes operational environments such as airport security or law‑enforcement communications.
Indeed, what was probably a once-in-a-lifetime outage was conflated by The Guardian on 8 July 2026 into a complete repudiation of the Minister’s previous position that BPL was prepared for the historical summer challenges to the power grid, thereby discrediting the Minister. Indeed, what should have been recognised as a once-in-a-lifetime outage with no human cause was, by The Guardian on 8 July 2026, troublingly twisted into a sweeping dismissal of the Minister’s prior assurances. This PR failure has not only undermined the Minister’s credibility but also set a dangerous precedent for future responses and communications. Even if the rest of this summer passes without further power outages, the shadows of this incident will loom large, allowing detractors to continuously reference the events of 5 July 2026 as proof of systemic failures within BPL.
BPL’s communications unit must learn from this debacle to prevent the erosion of trust and protect the Minister and BPL from enduring damage in the public eye. Let this serve as a wake-up call: effective crisis communication is not just a matter of optics; it is a critical function essential to ensuring resilience and maintaining confidence in BPL leadership during unprecedented challenges. If they fail to address this misstep, they risk not only BPL’s reputation but also the very trust that underpins its relationship with the community it serves.
Sincerely,
Michael J. Brown
