Pouring of concrete begins at Chalillo
Most of the publicity about the Chalillo hydroelectric project has involved the legal and political battles over its very existence. But Chalillo is making the transition from controversy to reality. This morning I visited the site to attend a ceremony marking the first pouring of what will be more concrete than this country has ever seen.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
It’s legal obstacles now in the past, work on the Chalillo Hydro Electric Project is in full swing. According to Chief Executive Officer of Belize Electricity Limited, Lynn Young, the project is close to completion.
Lynn Young, C.E.O., Belize Electricity Limited
“We’re on the final leg basically of building the dam because we’ve done all the excavations, cleared the overburden, the softer rock and gone down to the rock. We’ve pressure washed the rock and pressurized the grouting into the rock and now we’re starting to place the concrete that’s actually going to be the dam itself.”
Chalillo’s storage is critical to the efficient operation of the Mollejon hydro plant located further down the Macal River. B.E.L. says Belize’s ever increasing demands for energy has fuelled attempts to have the dam functioning by the next dry season, but setbacks this year could mean the company won’t meet its deadline.
Janelle Chanona
“For the next six months, construction workers will spend most of their day doing this, laying concrete, three hundred thousand tons worth. That concrete will be responsible for holding back more than forty-five thousand million gallons of water, that will be Chalillo.”
Lynn Young
“It’s a gravity dam and it’s the weight of the dam that’s really holding the dam in place. The dam is not anchored into the abutments like say an arch type dam or that sort. This is pretty modern technology and it’s built that way, because a gravity dam can tolerate movement of the earth. So if there was an earthquake and the earth were to move, and if it were tied into the abutments it would crack up the dam. But because it’s not tied into the abutments, it can tolerate movement and an earthquake doesn’t bother a dam like this. So it’s much bigger than a conventional arch type dam because you have to put a lot of weight there.”
The People’s United Party government was one section of society that threw a lot of weight behind the project.
Ralph Fonseca, Minister of Finance
“We’ve always said that this was the only way to go. We’ve worked the democracy the entire way with all of the enemies of the project, who we always believed were foreign forces, being foreign funded trying to hold up the development of Belize. But now the development of Belize continues. So that must give us a very good feeling certainly for myself since we’ve been involved since the early 80s when we started the studies and we knew that this was the only way to go, there was no alternative.”
B.E.L. says it is also currently reviewing alternatives for limiting negative environmental impacts caused by the project.
Lynn Young
“We have to clear the reservoir in the back and we want to do that just before we start impounding the dam because in Belize, you clear it now and if we don’t impound the dam until next year, most of it will be grown back already, so timing of that is essential. We have submissions for the nesting boxes for the macaw parrots because we are going to be putting up nest boxes to assist, to reduce the impact to the macaws. But the E.C.P. is being monitored by the Department of the Environment, and they come here on a weekly basis and so far we haven’t had any issues. You might find something…because there is a communication challenge with the contractor, they’re Chinese, and that to me has been the only place where we might have some hiccups. Now and again, they might understand things correctly and you have to come in and explain it to then, but so far it’s going pretty smoothly.”
