7 News Belize

Blackouts Caused By Drought
posted (April 23, 2020)

There was a wide area blackout early this morning, and BEL says that it was caused by a damaged transmission structure near San Estevan in the Orange Walk District. 

The failure happened sometime after 1 a.m., about an hour and a half later, a BEL crew was able to make the necessary repairs to restore power to most of the communities in the Corozal and Toledo Districts. Portions of the Orange Walk and Stann Creek Districts also had their electricity restored.

Several hours later, they were able to restore power to the rest of the Belize Cayo and the Stann Creek Districts. Unfortunately, this blackout still affected some residents of the Corozal District until late into the morning.

According to the company, the extended drought and the seasonal dry weather conditions have been causing excessive dust to build up on their power lines across the country. That has resulted in numerous electrical faults and sudden disruption of electricity. BEL says that frequent outages have been happening in various parts of the country due to bush fires, which damage the base of the pole structures for their transmission and distribution lines. The time required to replace the poll structures damaged by these faults and fires can last anywhere from 2 to 8 hours.

The company says that it has intensified its countrywide system maintenance program to mitigate these unplanned power outages. They are now changing out insulators on structures that are more susceptible to dust-build up. They are also washing insulators to manage dust build-up on equipment and structures. And finally, they are clearing vegetation near poles to create a gap that reduces the spread of wildfires. 

But, the avoid the pain of unplanned outages like last night, the company says that Belizeans will have to suffer through a series of scheduled outages of 6 to 8 hours to get these works done. The service areas that will experience these planned outages are in the customers in the Corozal, Orange Walk and Cayo Districts, which has the highest frequency of the types of unplanned outages that the company is describing. Customers in those service areas will be notified in advance of each scheduled outage.

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