BSI employee suffers extensive burns to body

The BELCOGEN project at the Belize Sugar Industries has been running into a series of snags. And now mechanical failures that have been affecting processing operations have landed one employee in the hospital.  Edward Robinson was scalded over ninety percent of his body late Tuesday evening and is being treated for the extensive burns. Attempts to fly him out of the country for urgent medical attention have been slowed down because he does not have travel documents. Today factory manager of BSI, John Gillett, explained what happened and told us that the employee, who has worked at the company for over thirty years, will be traveling as soon as his documents are in order.

John Gillett, Factory Mgr., BSI

“There was an apparent fault that showed up on a transformer between BSI and Belcogen.  That fault caused the safety features to be activated and isolated the electrical power completely to the tower hill factory. Belcogen responded immediately by proceeding to shut down the boilers but in doing so the steam safety devices built into the system did not function as anticipated.  This caused a pressure build-up in the system, resulting in the top of the condensing pot for the number two evaporator to be ruptured.  Concurrently, the evaporator attendant who got injured, Edward Robinson, fifty-seven years old, who was in the cabin at that time, walked up to the door and was instantaneously showered with hot water coming from this condensing pot. The condensing pot is located on the ground floor and the cabin is on the floor above so the water would be sprayed up.  Between that floor is galvanized gratings which could not stop the water from spraying up.  The patient was immediately transported to the Orange Walk Hospital and transferred to the Belize Healthcare Partners in Belize City where his condition at this time is guarded. The extent of burns has been assessed to be seventy percent first degree and twenty percent second degree.  So that is the level to which he has been burnt.”

Marion Ali

“Have the doctors told you what the prognosis is?”

John Gillett

John Gillett

“No I have not been updated on that.  Presently we have our people in Belize City along with the Social Security personnel sorting out the travel arrangements and everything.  We are having some difficulty with the travel documents, without any passport, without any birth certificate and those things have to be worked on but I’m sure there’s a way of working around that.  This is the second time that we have had that sort of power failure between BSI and Belcogen.  The first one certainly did not result in anything like this but this one was far more intense.  We have had meetings since morning and looking at all preventative measures in which we can prevent a reoccurrence.”

The mechanical problems are also affecting cane farmers whose sugarcane cannot be processed in a timely fashion, resulting in less yields of sugar.  With Tuesday evening’s accident, Gillett said the milling of sugarcane was further delayed.  We’ll have an update on the plight of the sugarcane processing in tomorrow’s newscast.