And while you may have lost your equipment or appliances, we'll bet it wasn't as bad as losing your water and your ability to take a shower or wash up last night.
That's what tens of thousands of Belize district residents endured yesterday evening and last night after water supply went from a trickle to nothing at all between 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm yesterday. And it didn't return until 5:00 this morning!
So what caused it, and who, if anyone is to blame for you missing your nightly shower?
Today Jomarie Lanza spoke with the chairman of BWS who gave us more details:
If a power crisis wasn't bad enough for Belize City resident's yesterday, a break in a BWS main line in Ladyville caused a 15 hour water interruption to Belize City and its suburbs.
The BWS chairman shared with us that the cause of this break trickles down to the ongoing power outages. He explained how.
Cornelio Acosta, Chairman of Belize Water Services
"Yesterday BWS was undertaking some works on the new Haulover Creek bridge which was a tie in of a redundancy 14 inch line to feed Northside Belize city. While undertaking this tie-in we were informed of a possible leak on the Ladyville road and we had dispatched some crews around 3:00Pm to take a look at it and we then assessed that there was a main break on our 34 inch main line that feeds Belize city. We started to mobilize our crews to look at what was required, heavy duty equipment and notification of the other utilities just in case there were their own wires and underground infrastructure near ours, as part of our policy and protocol. We immediately started to make these works on the 24 inch line and around 7:00 8:00 Pm we managed to get deep enough to get deep enough you know it's about ten feet we had to dig and then we found that there was a 23 Ft break (long) on the 24 inch mainline. Normally the length of pipes is about 20 feet so it was a little over a length that needed to be replaced. And then based on assessment from our technical staff due to the power fluctuations we have been having, it created like a wave effect within the distribution system which only unfortunately created a hammering effect and then will hit like waves hitting the weakest point of a pipe if you may."
Acosta says that they have not experienced a major break in that line for the past two years and despite their efforts to place mechanisms in the area to reduce the impact of these power fluctuations it wasn't enough to protect the distribution system:
Cornelio Acosta, Chairman of Belize Water Services
"It's a huge loss for us, not only that but in terms of the repairs that we required afterwards. Last night our crews were out from 1:00 in the afternoon working on these lines and they did not complete the works till about 4, 4:30 this morning again working through very perilous conditions. We had several cave ins at the site itself and cave ins are dangerous because it is dirt falling on top of people along with water and along with that we experienced a very bad and unfortunate incident where a drunk driver did not respect this stopping cones and almost hit our employees and ran over one of our lights there fortunately and thank goodness nothing severe happened but again we work under these very dangerous methods and thankfully the staff has been pulling through and they worked hard to restore service back again."
It was a long night into morning for the BWS crew, but the job is almost done and residents should be seeing a stabilization in the water pressure by this evening.
Cornelio Acosta, Chairman of Belize Water Services
"We expect to normalize by 6:00 Pm this afternoon bearing any unfortunate incident. Hopefully nothing happens and the repairs on the north side has been completed on the Phillip goldson highway. Those have been completed and we do expect by 6:00Pm to normalize moving forward. We as part of our business continuity plan what we had Initially worked on and will have to scale up next month is running a secondary transmission line coming from the George Price highway to Belize city so in the event that our primary line suffers any unforeseen incident we have a redundancy line on the north side and a redundancy line coming in from the George price highway and that should suffice taking care of Belize city. And the cost of that we are looking at somewhere around 2.5 million dollars and we are hoping to complete that within the next year."
