B.E.L. upgrades feeders 7 and 8
If you live in Ladyville or other parts of the Belize District on electricity feeders seven and eight, you are sure to remember the numerous power failures last year due to flashes on the lines and other difficulties. Since November, B.E.L. has been working to upgrade the entire system and try to prevent a recurrence this dry season by replacing old poles and lines, many of which were over twenty-five years old. News 5 was at mile eight and a half on the Western Highway this afternoon to see some of the work and find out what exactly has been done so far.
Lloyd Winsor, Distribution Manager, B.E.L.
“The latter part of the dry season we experience numerous outages on this section of the feeder and also on the Belize City system. And most of those problems were caused by dust contamination and salt contamination. So after we went through all these outages we decided to have a planning meeting with our planning group and look at the source of all these problems and I guess come up with a plan as to what we need to do.”
“This particular section of the feeder has caused the greater problems for us last year, and one of the reasons why we wanted to focus on this section is we wanted to tie in the loop across Boom Road and back into the Northern Highway, which gave us an alternate feed to feed back towards right around the system. This particular section line is over across Boom Road, but the section that we want to do in the inter-tie is back towards Belize City and that would tie the Western Highway into the Northern Highway through an inter-tie at the back of the Mahogany Street Area.”
Anthony Staine, Line Supervisor, B.E.L.
“Basically we are doing the reliability project and this consists of changing the bolt poles, the cement structures, we are re-insulating, which basically means that we are changing the insulators that we once had and at the same we are also changing the cables, upgrading the cables to newer cables. As you all know, it was twenty-five years or more that this line was put up.”
B.E.L. says it has invested about two point six million dollars in the System Reliability Project. More than one thousand, five hundred insulators have been replaced and a hot line insulator washer is arriving in the country today, which they say will be used for preventative maintenance in areas where salt and dust pose a problem. B.E.L. says Dangriga customers will be the next in line for a system upgrade, with work scheduled for 2005.
