Living in Puerto Lopez: Blackouts

Puerto Lopez, like any developing city, has an issue with uninterrupted power.  We have occasional flickers and sometime hour-long periods when the lights go completely out.  When this happens, the entire town goes black; only a few residences and some businesses (especially the hospital) have power.  (The only electricity is available by generator, and it's easy to determine who has one and who doesn't.)  That's not too surprising when the electrical infrastructure looks like:

There are three main causes for this; one of which is when we lose a supply line from Puerto Cayo 30km to the north for any number of reasons: a bus hits a power pole, someone accidentally cuts the line, a pole tips over, etc.

Another has been an accepted practice here for years.  Street vendors (and the former beach cabanas) used to "borrow" power, without cost, by tapping into a local supply line.  They will obtain power by hooking their lines into the local grid, either by using a wooden stick to connect to the trunk line or by simply tossing their own wires over the street lines.  If the polarity of the connection is reversed (hot to negative) or if the positive connects with a different service (such as an old telephone line), the grid will short out and, like the old Pat Travers song says, "Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights".

This picture isn't great (it had to be a stealth), but check out the wiring:

Most of these businesses have either been closed or received proper connections.  The city is committed to burying the lines and stopping the theft:

The third reason for an outage is the only one we can prepare for.  Yesterday, three medium-sized navy ships arrived in our bay:

Having seen them a few times before, I knew that there would be spontaneous blackouts in the city throughout the night, and this happened between 8:00p last night and 3:00a this morning.

What am I doing up at 3:00a on a Wednesday?  The outages were anywhere from five minutes to an hour long.  When the outage happens, everything goes completely quiet: the refrigerator, the ceiling fans, the dance parties across town - everything; even the dogs stop barking!  When the power comes back on, so do the parties, the fans, the dogs and chickens, etc.

Why does this happen?  This is pure speculation on the part myself and other people I know, but we suspect it is to watch for smuggling and that the illegal boats are more easily spotted at night.

Curiously, this has nothing to do with drugs or narcotics, at least here on the central coast.  Ecuador recently imposed high tariffs on imported goods, as high as 40% on some goods brought into the country.

There was a bust south of Puerto Lopez a little while back.  The contraband consisted entirely of name-brand clothing and, I believe, small appliances.  In a case like that, it is more cost-effective to smuggle the goods into the country than it is to pay the duties that a legal shipment would incur.

I guess the only moral to the story is this: buy local and let's all keep the lights on!