...That's what consumers in Northern Belize had to endure yesterday one of the hottest days of the year after a collapse in BEL's national power grid. But it wasn't only the Nortenos, BEL customers throughout the country had to live with a blackout for some period of time. In the population area which BEL calls the central zone, most Belize City residents were without electricity for 8 to ten hours. That made for a miserable and sweltering Sunday for most, and today BEL sent out a release saying basically, "sorry, our bad." It seems that while engineers thought the problem was somewhere in the 70 mile span of power lines between the mile 8 substation and Mollejon, after a full day of searching, it turned out that the problem was right under their noses. A release from BEL says that the fault resulted from a malfunctioning lightning arrester at the mile 8 station that was not discovered until sometime yesterday evening.
And what made matters worse is that the fault on the Mollejon line, coincided with a planned maintenance outage at the Xel Ha substation in Mexico which feeds Belize. With the western line and Mexico down, the central and northern portion of the country suffered with the outage for most of yesterday's daylight hours. We'll add that the record outage is hardly good public relations for the light company as it presses the Public Utilities Commission for an average 15% increase in rates after balking at a proposed 8% increase.
