B.E.L. explains weekend blackout
Around two on Sunday morning, most of the country was plunged into total darkness after Belize Electricity Limited suffered a major equipment breakdown. According to B.E.L.’s Corporate Communications Manager, Neville Samuels, the power failure occurred after one of the switches at their Corozal substation was damaged because of dust contamination. Samuels says at the time of the outage the country was receiving sixty-four percent of its power supply from Mexico, while the balance was met through the diesel-fired generators at Belize City. To help meet the shortfall in supply, the Mollejon plant was brought on line and although electricity was restored to some areas, other parts of the country did not get service until that afternoon.
Neville Samuels, Corporate Communications Mgr., B.E.L.
“It took a longer time up north because we could not restore electricity service until we had replaced that switch. We didn’t locate the switch until about six that morning, so that’s like five hours later on. And then it took us some time to go do the work, to change and replace it, it took a longer time. In San Pedro, fortunately for them as well, while they went down initially because they are fed from the submarine cable from Bomba near Maskall to the island, they also had some standby units and they were able to get some power there by midmorning.”
“We’re going to have to do some testing and see if the area is really…if there is a lot of dust contamination there. It’s quite possible it could be that maybe there are dirt roads nearby, which in this time of the year it’s not raining, the place is real dusty and it’s settling on our equipment. If that’s the case, then we’re gonna probably have to (A) either replace the insulators with higher KV insulators, or we’ll have to carry out outages to wash down the equipment the same way we did in San Pedro. Both of which will inconvenience our customers, so they are really last resorts.”
Samuels assured consumers that initiatives now in the pipeline like the mile 8 gas turbine and Chalillo hydro project will minimise the prospect of such outages in the future.
