Residents of Lethem, in Region Nine are planning to picket the offices of the regional administration as well as the power company as the community and nearby villages remain affected by power outages since last Sunday.
Two heavy-capacity generators operated by the Lethem Power Company (LPC) have malfunctioned.
Regional Chairman Wilson Larantino told Stabroek News on Wednesday that technicians had travelled from the city to assess the problem.
The community is currently being powered by a smaller generator, which only has the capacity to power sections of Lethem and St Ignatius individually for six to eight hours.
According to reports from the border community, continuous power outages have taken a toll on local businesses as residents complained of water shortages in some parts as a result of the problem.
According to a resident of St Ignatius, members of the business community are concerned that neither the administration at Region Nine nor the power company has said anything to residents regarding the problem. “Worse yet, they ain’t telling we anything so we don’t know what really going on… all we getting is current over six and twelve hour,” the woman stated.
She said residents are being mobilised to protest the offices of the power company and the administration within the coming days.
A businessman, meanwhile, said that many persons had been running their generators to power their respective businesses since last Sunday and according to him, the move has proved difficult for many to maintain. He said he has already lost perishables, while noting that he was forced to discard several pounds of meat and other goods yesterday.
When contacted yesterday, persons at the offices of the power company told Stabroek News that Chairman of the board, Colin Singh, was unavailable. They said that Singh was on the coast.
Two years ago, members of the business community mounted a protest outside the office of the power company following a similar situation, in which the entity ran out of fuel to power the area.
Yesterday, a resident noted that the government should intervene and carry out an investigation into the operations of the board of the power company as one resident noted that the board has not been functioning effectively in recent years.
Others noted that the situation needed to be addressed since it does not bode well for the area which is developing into an economic link with neighbouring Brazil.
