BEL working hard to restore power
Another organisation with no shortage of heroes is Belize Electricity Limited. BEL crews worked throughout the storm and will still be repairing damage at least for the next several weeks. We caught up with BEL’s chief executive Lynn Young as he prepared to fly to San Pedro.
Lynn Young, Chief Executive Officer, BEL
“I think that our guys performed wonderfully. Our biggest fear was that our transmission lines, the 1-15 KV lines from Mollejon and from Mexico were down. If those had gone down, we would have been out of power for weeks, but they stood up throughout the whole hurricane. During the hurricane we had three emergency crews out during the entire storm and their instructions were focus on the media houses, BTL, the hospital, let’s keep those up as much as we can. We actually told them that if it was dangerous, then you had to give up, don’t do anything dangerous, don’t do anything that’s going to endanger your lives. But they were out there all during the storm and that’s fantastic I think.”
Stewart Krohn
“As well as you did, there’re still a lot of people out there as we speak who do not have electricity. What’s you message to those people?”
Lynn Young
“Well we have brought in… we have crews that we are flying in from the districts, from Punta Gorda, from Stann Creek, all our men are mobilised right now. There are a lot of logistics problems as you might expect in a situation like this. We have materials in Ladyville that we can’t bring in because of the conditions on the road. We have bucket trucks in Belmopan and Orange Walk and other places that we can’t bring in because of the conditions of the road. So right now we are sort of working with limited crews. We have men, but we don’t have equipment. We have some more stuff coming in from Canada in the next two days, that’s going to help us.”
Stewart Krohn
“Real quickly, what’s the prognosis for San Pedro and Caye Caulker?”
Lynn Young
“To be honest, I don’t know yet. We are flying over it right now and we’ll know after that. Belize City, I think we are going to have most of Belize City back by tonight. What is not in tonight, I think we’ll get in tomorrow unless we come up with some big problems.”
