ALLIGATOR POND, Manchester — Opposition spokesman on national security Senator Peter Bunting is calling on the security forces to bolster their patrols in areas without electricity following the passage of Hurricane Beryl.

“A lot of businesspeople have been asking for an increased presence of the security forces; because of the protracted period of electricity outage a lot of them don’t have a functioning alarm system because the batteries have gone down. The place is dark at night,” he said while on a tour of Alligator Pond in south Manchester on Sunday.

Bunting, a former minister of national security, pointed to Saturday’s robbery of an ATM in Clarendon to make his point.

“We saw in Longville Park [that an] ATM was stolen and a hardware [store] broken into. I think there is real fear in the business community — particularly in the small and medium-size businesses who can’t afford continuous heavy-duty generators — that there will be increased incidents of break-ins to their warehouses,” he said.

“We would have expected visible mobilisation of the military, for example, to assist the police in patrolling these areas without electricity over the last four or five days — especially as it seems that we may be facing weeks of outages in [some] areas,” he added.

— Kasey Williams