7 News Belize

BEL Says Overheating Caused Outage
posted (February 28, 2012)
Last night a blackout forced a five hour power outage across most of Belize City. It happened right at Primetime- and for the first time in memory, it forced us to cancel our evening newscast.

So, first off, to all our viewers who tuned in at 6:30 and then at 10:00, wondering what was up with the news - we do apologize. It was beyond our control, and we are taking steps to make sure it does not happen again.

But - it did happen last night - and that's why we aired Monday's news in our first ever morning newscast. A little confusing, but if you missed it, the entire newscast is now posted at 7newsbelize.com.

But moving on from our problem to the problem about fifty thousand Belize City residents faced between 5 and 11 p.m. yesterday when they had to get by without electricity.

BEL sent out a press release today which says that the unplanned power outage in Belize City was caused by faulty equipment at the Magazine Road Substation.

Employees at the Magazine Road Substation reported to the main office that equipment was overheating within the substation which required BEL - basically - to pull the plug and interrupt the supply to the substation which feeds the entire power grid that runs through Belize City. An earlier, unofficial report from BEL said that it was a fire related to a large transformer.

Whatever did happen, It was later determined that the problem was caused by a faulty vacuum switch on the capacitor banks - those are what help to maintain the quality of voltage on the system.

The problem was dealt with and at 10:56 p.m., power was restored to Belize City. Shortly before 6 this morning, they had to replace the faulty vacuum switch altogether, which required another brief power outage.

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