BEL Explains San Pedro Power Outage
San Pedro Town experienced a power outage on Sunday evening after a transformer owned by Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) failed near Ramon’s Village Resort around 6:00 p.m. Residents reported hearing a loud noise resembling an explosion.
BEL confirmed the blackout resulted from a hardware fault on the overhead section of the 34.5 kV sub-transmission line supplying electricity to the island. This line links San Pedro to the national grid through a mix of submarine, underground, and overhead segments.
The situation was worsened because BEL's San Pedro Gas Turbine, normally a backup power source, could not be started as it depends on the same damaged transmission line.
“The outage was caused by a hardware fault on the overhead portion of the 34.5 kV sub-transmission line that supplies power to the island,” BEL stated.
Additionally, adverse weather conditions delayed the process of restoring power.
Author's summary: A transformer failure on an overhead transmission line led to a power outage in San Pedro, with restoration hampered by reliance on the damaged line and bad weather.