On Sunday BEL had planned an epic power outage for virtually all of Belize City – from 5:30 am to 12:00 noon. It was scheduled to blanket the city in blackout, right up to mile one on the Northern and Western Highways. But the good news is that it's not going to happen after all. And for that, we have TD 2 to thank.
Sure, the storm wreaked havoc with floodwaters in the south but it also dropped an immense amount of rain on the Chalillo dam in western Belize.
That's the cheapest energy source available, and so BEL is holding up the blackout to harness the low cost power option. Company Secretary Dawn Sampson Nunez explained:
Dawn Sampson - Nunez - BEL Corporate Secretary
"We have made the decision to postpone that power outage to a later time - mainly because the water levels at the Chalillo hydroelectric facility has increased significantly following Tropical Depression 2. It did surprise us in terms of the level of water that that weather system brought with it but it is good news - there's a significant increase of water levels and subsequently energy being produced from that facility. So by postponing the outage it gives us the opportunity to be able to use the energy flowing from the hydroelectric facility as opposed to having it waste."
The city-wide outage will still happen – but they'll wait for when the dam isn't running over with a super abundance of water. Chalillo captured 70 million cubic meters of water as a result of TD2.
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