B.E.L.: separate blackouts are Mexico’s fault

Conspiracy theorists will tell you the separate nationwide blackouts that occurred over the long weekend were messages from Belize Electricity Limited to the Public Utilities Commission. But according to a press release from the power company, the outages were the result of trips on the Mexican transmission line. BEL maintains that Monday’s outage was due to a damaged switch on C.F.E.’s two hundred and thirty kilovolt line. The lights were back on in just over an hour but this morning another blackout occurred at about five-fourteen when one of C.F.E.’s auto-transformers failed. While the Mexicans worked to fix the problem, B.E.L. says it switched to local generation sources. The C.F.E. supply was restored at six-thirty-two, but due to a damaged insulator on a line feeding Corozal, that northern district did not see electricity restored until eight o’clock. B.E.L. says it regrets any inconvenience caused.