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It’s been a record year for BEL: record revenue of $176 million, a near record net loss of $10 million and this weekend it seems like the company was going for another record, a record blackout. It’s going to be tough, they’ve set the bar high, but on Friday night into Saturday morning that record seemed within reach. There was a national power outage at about 11:35 in the night and it wasn’t fully restored until almost 5 am in some areas of the country. On Sunday in Belize City power went out at about 2:30 in the afternoon and came back around 5:23 in the evening.

So what caused it? Well, On Friday night, a ground wire broke away from a pole near the Buena Vista Substation and caused a fault on the transmission line between Mexico and Belize. The outage was extended because the Gas Turbine which usually kicks in to pick up the slack is down for maintenance for two weeks. So BEL had to turn to Belize Aquaculture Limited in the south to get power.

And Sunday’s blackout was caused when a lightning arrestor failed during a lightning storm that passed over Belize City. Then there was a 40 minute outage in the Hattieville area on Sunday night. And this morning at 3:00 power was lost on the Southern Highway and it was not re\stored until 4:30 am. That was due to windblown trees falling across power lines.

A rough spell, but it could get worse in the coming days as Mexico’s CFE have told BEL that on July 15, they may have to take out another one of their large generators for maintenance. This would make an already bad situation worse. It’s bad because as we told you Westlake which is the major diesel plant is out of commission for the time being. So starting on Wednesday the 15th, there could be outages.