B.E.L. takes heat for massive blackout
It was another one of those massive blackouts that wasn’t supposed to happen under the efficient management of a well financed and privatised electric company. But last night around eight-thirty Belize was plunged into darkness…and while power was restored to some segments of the grid at various times, it was not until this afternoon that current was re-established nationwide. News 5’s Stewart Krohn asked B.E.L. spokesman Neville Samuels exactly what’s going on.
Neville Samuels, Corporate Communications Mgr., B.E.L.
“Basically we had a fault on our 116 transmission line, which allows us to connect to C.F.E. to get the supply that they provide to us. That was in the area of the span between Mexico by Xul-ha to the mile-eight substation where we transmit the power supply to where it gets disbursed to the grid. The other problem was–well that occurred this morning, cause when we had the problem on the 115 line last night we ended up using the gas turbine to block start our system, and that held up. Everything went well last night, but this morning around seven-twenty-five we had a problem with what we suspect was the fuel valve and the system went down on us.”
Stewart Krohn
“Now you talked about the line between Belize and Mexico, you’re not blaming this blackout on Mexico again are you?”
Neville Samuels
“No, we’re not. It’s just a transmission line; it’s the 115 kV transmission line which transmits the supply from Mexico to Belize. What we had was a case of the guy wire anchoring one of the structures–of course they’re about nine hundred structures on that line, because it’s a ninety-mile span of lines, and most of it are in the swamp. We had corrosion on one of the anchors in the ground and it just let go the guy wire, which balances the pole, and the guy wire then made contact with the high-tension line, just causes them to trip. But couldn’t solve that last night…we actually had a plane go out. We flew over the land several times to try and identify the spot. And then we sent our crew there today and they made the fix and we had the line back in place by two-thirty this afternoon.”
Stewart Krohn
“It has been speculated that a problem like that might be from lack maintenance, and that since privatisation B.E.L. has steadily cut back on this type of maintenance. Is it the case that you’ve gone a little soft on maintenance, and secondly, whether you have or not, shouldn’t this kind of corrosion be detected in a regular inspection?”
Neville Samuels
“Actually Stewart, we are disappointed ourselves, because in previous years I think we had improved our service markedly, and we’ve really had a tough year this year. We’ve had a lot of issues with the salt, with the salt contamination and the dust, the bush fires, so we’ve been hurt bad this year. But it’s not a matter of going soft on maintenance. Quiet honestly, we’ve been spending anywhere in the region of five to ten million dollars every year on maintenance. But what we are doing now is after looking at what has been happening to us, we are now systematically going out and when we do our inspections, like making sure that we inspect particular components. Because interestingly, we have ongoing inspection of the 115 transmission line, but it’s quite possible that we never just picked up on the fact that one of those guy wires might be corroded and could actually come in contact with a high tension wire.”
Stewart Krohn
“Neville, in the past we’ve talked to you and we’ve talked to C.E.O. Lynn Young, and we’ve talked to Chairman of Fortis, Mr. Marshall. Whenever we ask about price and the fact that we pay a fairly high rate for electricity, people from B.E.L. always turn it around to say, well let’s not talk about price, what consumers really want it service and reliability. But taking you at your own word, it seems like what we’re getting out of B.E.L. now is anything but service and reliability. What are you going to do to put this situation back where you like it?”
Neville Samuels
“Like I said, we’ve been having a tough year and I’m sure our service and our reliability has been questioned often times this year and justifiably so. People tend to remember what happens fairly recent than what happened in the past. And so we are looking at our performance to date, for this year. But we’ve actually initiated a reliability improvement project this year. We started at the end of the third quarter, and over the next four months we are going to be working on the trouble areas that we identified during this year and trying to clean up and make sure that things are better on a go forward basis.”
Samuels said that one bright spot was that B.E.L. improved the time it took to get its gas turbine plant in operation… from five hours in the last blackout to one hour last night. The plant is designed to be up and running in fifteen minutes.
