BEL Explains San Pedro Power Outage
On Sunday evening, San Pedro Town was suddenly left without electricity after a transformer owned by Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) failed near Ramon’s Village Resort shortly after 6:00 p.m. Witnesses reported hearing a loud noise resembling an explosion just before the blackout.
In an official release, BEL confirmed that the outage was triggered by a hardware fault in the overhead section of the 34.5 kV sub-transmission line delivering power to the island.
The company explained that this key line links San Pedro to the national grid through a mix of submarine, underground, and overhead systems. Efforts to restore supply were further hampered by poor weather conditions.
According to BEL, the San Pedro Gas Turbine could not be activated because it depends on the same damaged transmission line.
Summary
The outage in San Pedro was caused by a fault on a critical BEL power line, leaving the island without backup options and delaying repairs due to bad weather.