One crime that has no classification on that list affected tens of thousands of Belizeans in the west and north who this morning woke up with dead phone lines, and low or no cell signal.
It is the result of a major act of vandalism at BTL's mile 23 cell site on the Western Highway. Again, it is a case of copper thieves - but this time, they also went under the earth to yank out fiber optic cables - which meant the loss of voice calls and also the loss of cable television signal - to municipalities as far as Punta Gorda.
That sent BTL technicians into emergency recovery mode as they had to restore all signals as soon as possible. We found out more from Anjali Vasquez, BTL's Public Relations Manager:…
Anjali Vasquez, BTL's Public Relations Manager
"A little after midnight this morning we found out that voice services had gone down because our mile 23 site was completely vandalize - both fiber and copper were stolen from the site which affected voice services in that area and being that it is a network and it is interconnected with other cell sites - affected areas in Belmopan and also in the North, so we had thousands of customers lose service due to theft. Copper and fiber - it was all stolen. We don't have any reason
why, we are not sure why they went in the way they did and the cell site was completely wreck beyond what we've experience before, so it's going beyond theft at this point. It's destruction of property as well."
Jules Vasquez
"You told me thousands of consumers, you have a more precise figure?"
Anjali Vasquez, BTL's Public Relations Manager
"Well let's just think of it this way Jules - the West and the North got affected by this one act. I think people don't realize that how big and impacting this type of theft is. When you steal from one site - you end up affecting many other areas of the country, it's not isolated. So with one act of vandalism we end up affecting - I could safely say tens of thousands of customers. The company does realize that this is an essential service so we do things like put in place redundant links to ensure that when there is an emergency like what happen last night, we would have facilities for customers to be able to make calls so most people would have experience degraded service but their service would not have gone down completely."
"At the effort of very diligent and very technical staff we were out on site first thing this morning at first light to ensure that we could get things back up and running and about 11 o' clock we were about 90%. It's an extreme cost to the consumer because their essential service - service that allows you to community whether it be voice - at this time it was voice but very often it's also your internet service. Those service become compromise, they are essential services in a day and that is why we are requesting that people start to access the situation that's happening - that theft is affecting them on a personal level and even help us battle the issue. Call us, call 119, call us here at Telemedia. Call Crime Stoppers; call the police because this is an issue bigger than one cell site. This is an issue of communicating to your business place, to your family even in an emergency and that can be an extremely thing. You pick up the phone and there is no dial tone. You pick up the phone and there is no signal."
A cost analysis has not yet been finalized - but that too will likely be in the thousands of dollars.
