President Taran at 1:00

 

By Murray Ford

 

Al Dos Santos, Rotary Cub of Miami

 

Edith Silva, guest of Al Dos Santos

Leah Cooper and Divincio Thompson from Eyewitness News

Jazmine Romer-Rolle from BPL

Edward Humes, guest of John Robertson

 

This week’s sergeant was PP Franny, who started off strong by warning us all that his jokes were terrible. There were a lot of absent pin fines handed out, mostly to past presidents and several corporate fines were handed out just for fun.

 

Make checks payable to: 

 

Joshua Major, October 18

2^nd VP Kenrad Wilchcombe, October 18

Hanna Foster-Middleton, October 20

PP Alan Wilson, October 20

 

Howard Evans, 2 years on October 19

Ryan Winters, 2 years on October 19

Eddie Gardiner, 22 years on October 20

 

We had a banner exchange from the Rotary Club of Miami this week.

 

There was a round of applause in Sir Durwood Knowles honour from receiving the Companion Order of The Bahamas award posthumously.

 

We are doing a joint campaign for White Ribbon Day with the Crisis Centre on November first, T-shirts are $15.

 

New member training was held at BTVI on Saturday.

 

The dictionary signing at the Thelma Gibson school went well with a good turn out. Thanks to everyone for the support!

 

PP. Lindsey reminded us about World Polio Day and to keep supporting and donating towards that.

 

PP. Franny updated us on the Hurricane relief for Florida which has reached $9000! Rotary will be matching that with $10000.

 

This week’s speaker was Mr. Shevonn Cambridge, CEO of BPL. Mr. Cambridge first started with BPL as a technician in 1998 and reached the position of CEO in May of this year.

            Starting with a brief history of BPL, we learned that the electric light act was passed in 1907 with our first power generating unit being installed on Bay Street in 1909 and in 1956 BEC was established. It was explained that the base rate was changed in 2010 and has not had a price increase since then.

            BPL operates over 17 island territories throughout The Bahamas, which comes with some very unique challenges. A lot of the islands were originally private networks, so BPL had to evolve and grow, rebuilding and revamping these systems to standardise them and make them more efficient. Part of the infrastructural improvement plans includes integration of new technologies and renewables and moving on from manually running stations to being automatic. This would mean not having to wait for a technician to drive to a substation to switch them back on or having someone sitting and watching the energy load at the generators. By integrating the use of things like solar microgrids and LED streetlighting, they are also hoping to cut the carbon footprint.

            With all this in mind, the upcoming price increase is in order to fund the modernization of our nations default power supplier in order to bring sustainably reliable power throughout The Bahamas.  

 

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