BEL Explains San Pedro Power Outage
San Pedro Town experienced a power blackout on Sunday evening after a transformer owned by Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) failed near Ramon’s Village Resort shortly after 6:00 p.m. Residents reported hearing a sound resembling an explosion.
“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.
This sub-transmission line links San Pedro to the national grid using a combination of submarine, underground, and overhead systems. Adding to the challenge, BEL’s San Pedro Gas Turbine, the usual backup power source, could not be utilized because it also depends on the affected transmission line.
Bad weather further hindered the efforts to restore electricity quickly, according to the company.
Summary: A transformer fault and bad weather caused a blackout in San Pedro, with backup systems disabled due to reliance on the damaged transmission line, complicating restoration.