Rural Belize District suffers 5 hour blackout
While the proposals to end the Guatemalan claim dominate the headlines, last night many Belizeans were forced to turn their attention to more immediate concerns. Jacqueline Woods reports.
Jacqueline Woods, Reporting
It’s safe to say that most residents in the Belize District did not get much sleep after a prolonged power outage kept them in the dark and without the benefit of a fan on a sweltering Tuesday night. Today, B.E.L. workmen were back at the Ladyville substation replacing the damaged equipment that left thousands of Belizeans without power for five hours.
Derek Davis, Vice President, Energy Supply, B.E.L.
“The real and root cause of the problem was one of our isolating device which we called a recloser which is located in our Ladyville substation. It had what we call an intermittent fault. In other words, the fault was not consistent. It had a fault, then it cleared, it had a fault and then it cleared and this is one of the most difficult type of problems to solve in the electrical business.”
Derek Davis, B.E.L.’s Vice President of Energy Supply described the incident as a rare occurrence because the company follows a strict maintenance programme for its equipment.
Derek Davis
“Strictly we do maintenance yearly on these equipment, we analyzed and check, but from time to time we will have a few failures. Usually a fault like that if it is a solid fault will not cause such an extended outage because we would have isolated it quickly, but like I said the intermittent nature of it we had to trouble shoot approximately five hours to find exactly what it was, and then isolate it and restore the area with power.”
Davis says he is aware that people may have become concerned about their appliances being affected due to the several outages that occurred, but he says there should not have been any damages because there was not a sustained low voltage on residents’ household appliances. Jacqueline Woods reporting for News 5.
The power outage affected feeders seven, nine, ten and eleven, including Ladyville, the P.S.W. Goldson International Airport, Hattieville and other parts of the Belize District.
