6 more lamposts were set on fire this weekend and tonight Orange Walk police have three men detained for questioning in connection with the act of sabotage. 7NEWS has confirmed that at least two of those men are known UDP activists and one is a member of the Central Executive. BEL has confirmed that vandals cut and burnt six more poles in Northern Belize on Saturday. Because of that, BEL has announced that the company will be forced to schedule rotating outages in an attempt to manage what has turned into a full-blown power supply crisis. The vandals attacked Saturday afternoon when they cut and then set on fire 6 of the power company's 115 kilovolt transmission poles, which supply power from CFE in Mexico. There was no blackout from this incident because a BDF air patrol noticed the damaged and alerted BEL technicians. They responded to the scene and were able to prevent the burnt poles from falling. That however was only a temporary fix. The problem was aggravated yesterday by CFE's own problems in Mexico which forced them to cut their supply to Belize. So for power BEL had to turn to hydro power from Mollejon which was already running on empty.
The company says it needs to repair the damaged poles and to do that it will have to schedule countrywide outages. Since January, saboteurs have hit 20 poles and up to last week, before this latest act, repairs had cost the company $1 million. BEL is now offering a $5,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the vandals.
