Veteran businessman Stephen Thomson estimates that $40-$50 million of income was lost by all businesses in Hamilton during the four-day blackout caused by a failure at the Belco switching station.

The owner of the two Mailboxes Unlimited businesses as well as Just Shirts Drycleaners, Quality Cleaners, Coral Cleaners and Paget Cleaners said yesterday that the Island's businesses not only took a big hit financially but the four-day outage was a huge hit to its credibility as a stable centre for international business. He is now calling on Belco to install a back-up system so future outages do not send Hamilton commerce grinding to a halt.

"It is bizarre to me that we don't have a backup system that is capable of running this island. I run 90 percent of the drycleaners on the island and I have backup boilers, backup compressors, backup filtration systems, backup chillers and I have backup for my backup," he said. "I don't want this to be white washed and swept under carpet and everybody worked hard and let's pat one another on the back and go back to business as usual . We need to solve this problem, we need to come up with an answer, we need to hear what it is going to cost and we need to fix it as a country or lets not play in the big leagues let's just say we are third world and let's just stick with that."

Mr. Thomson's six businesses were closed from Thursday morning to Monday morning resulting in $60,000 in lost income and $30,000 in lost wages. With those figures known, Mr. Thomson began to estimate the cost of the outage for all of the businesses on Par-la-ville Road which includes a handful of restaurants and a law firm. He estimates the single street lost $1 million in revenue and then multiplied that amount throughout the city of Hamilton.

He "cannot imagine the total amount of loss revenue was not $40-$50 million" and adds that there will however be some some small businesses that can't afford to pay employees for those days missed.

"Belco will throw out numbers that it is so many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to create a back up system that can run this Island, but calculate what the loss of revenue was for this country for those four days because Sunday is a working day for many people," he said. "We have built our reputation as a country on stability and clearly we are not stable if we can go down for 72 hours."By press time, Belco had not responded to a query about how much it would cost to build a back-up system for the country. The power company has previously stated that it would cost $10 million to rebuild the infrastructure damaged in the fire.

On Sunday, former Home Affairs Minister Quinton Edness demanded that Government hold an independent inquiry into Belco's operations and systems but yesterday Minister of Labour, Home Affairs and Public Safety Randy Horton only told Parliament that "Belco itself will engage in a critical assessment of the mishap and its impact upon the community at large, with the end in view of ensuring that the island is never faced with this kind of situation again."

Minister Horton said however that Government and other property owners in the City of Hamilton must "examine their redundancy power provisions, with the end in view of ensuring that power will be maintained even in the face of a BELCO outage".

"Too much is lost by both local and international businesses when the City of Hamilton is forced to cease operation unexpectedly and for a protracted period as happened at the end of last week," the minister said.

Mr. Thomson does not own any generators, but he may buy them to ensure his businesses can operate in the event of future outages. In reality though, even if he had generators to run his businesses, "if Hamilton is shut because everyone else has gone home how many people will be knocking on the door to get suits and dresses drycleaned or send out a FedEx package through Mailboxes?"

"If Hamilton is shut down because there is no power it is not just me that needs to get a generator but every business in town needs to get one or Belco needs to fix problem," he said adding that it was simply unacceptable to give the rest of the island power while Hamilton, "the breadbasket of the Island which feeds our employees and pays for us to live" could not effectively resume commerce till Monday.

"It needs to be other way around. The bread basket needs to come on so our employees can earn money and eat and we can sweat in our own homes," he said.

Mr. Thomson was also frustrated by the lack of communication about when power would go back on in Hamilton. His staff came to work on Friday after hearing that power would go on at noon. They were disappointed then and again 24-hours later when the power was still off. it finally went back on -- according to the security calls he received informing him that alarms were going off at his businesses -- at 6:42 p.m. on Saturday.

"From Thursday at 3am to Monday at 8am is what we were told. There was no communication throughout the weekend saying that you will be on Saturday night although much of Hamilton was. Why Saturday and Sunday are not treated as business days is beyond me because many businesses operate and certainly if we weren't able to operate on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, I would have thought that many of us would have chosen to operate Sunday if we had been given the choice."

Mr. Thomson said that while he fully understands that Belco has never experienced such an outage in recent history, his great concern is "what are we going to do moving forward so that if we lose power we have the capacity through backup systems to run this Island."