Placencia suffers 24 hr. blackout

The entire Placencia Peninsula was without electricity for nearly twenty-four consecutive hours over the weekend. The blackout, which lasted from three forty-three Saturday morning until one fifty-four Sunday morning, wreaked havoc with refrigerated food and severely disrupted those residents dependent on electric pumps for water, not to mention the area’s lively social life. According to a B.E.L. release, the outage was caused by a lightning strike on a transformer at the Independence substation. The damage was greater than originally estimated and it took several shifts of repair crews working around the clock to identify and fix the problem.