And while its employees must be reeling from the news of an imminent, inevitable government takeover, today, BEL work crews were out doing emergency repairs in the Belize District after a freak storm last night.
It was a ferocious squall which descended on the city at about 1:00 am with tremendous lightning bolts and driving winds and rains from the northwest.
The winds gusted up to 50 miles an hour, felling this SMART telephone tower on Raccoon Street and leaving it like a crumpled paper clip.
No one was hurt, but it did make for a terrific site, reminiscent of when our channel 7 tower collapsed in Hurricane Richard.
This, though, was not a hurricane - but with winds of 51 miles an hour, it qualified for tropical storm for winds - and coming as it did from an unusual direction, it exposed many unknown weaknesses in structures.
And the unknown was a key element in this squall - because not even the MET office forecasted it. We asked about that today:
Frank Tench, Meteorologist
"The radar images are showing the rain echoes as they approach the country from the north with our border with Mexico and as it move across the dark green areas represent areas where the showers and thunder storms were particularly intense as they move across the northern part of the Belize District."
Jules Vasquez
"Is it something that was unforeseeable or unforeseen?"
Frank Tench, Meteorologist
"In terms of the severity of the storms we were caught off-guard with that. What happen last night was that the thunder storms were particularly severe and they affected not only the northern districts but portions of northern Belize District last night. Part of the weather experience could be describe as a squall because of the strong winds and the intense rain showers that accompanied this squall. We recorded gusts up to 44 knots here last night which is about 51 miles per hour wind. The wind factor would probably work out a little off-guard with the strength of the winds and the severity of some of the showers and thunder storms that accompanied it but in general we did expect thunder storms in the forecast."
"Any structure that's not properly constructed and not build to withstand those kinds of winds would suffer some structural damage due to these kinds of winds. Another factor to bear in mind would have been the effect on marine activity; we did not issue a small craft caution or warning in the forecast up to last night so any mariner on the sea would have been caught off-guard with this kind of winds."
Many areas had extended power outages due to damage to lampposts and power lines….
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