March 9, 2010

Haiti hydro needs complete distribution grid system rebuild

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Weeks after a catastrophic earthquake flattened downtown Port-au-Prince, power has returned to nearly half the city’s neighborhoods.

Most, however, are in the hilly southern suburbs, which look down at night on the miles of near blackness where most of the quake-rendered homeless abide in teeming tent cities.

Even before the Jan. 12 quake, electrical service in Haiti meant an average of 10 hours of power a day delivered by a rickety grid to just a quarter of the population - not even half of them paying customers.

If Haiti now hopes to shake off its status as the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, experts say, it will need to build a power system far better than the highly subsidized, cash-hemorrhaging utility it had before the disaster.

The state-owned Electricite d’Haiti, like the government, is essentially broke. Fewer customers than ever are able or willing to pay. Haiti immediately needs $40 million to get its grid back to pre-quake status and pay its 2,500 workers, hundreds of whom are living in tents, the utility’s director-general, Serge Raphael, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The company said it needs to figure out how to finance itself — the payroll alone is $15 million a month— as well as provide power to the millions of Haitians who can’t afford it.

“This is one of the most pressing problems that Haiti is facing,” said Ernest Paultre, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s chief engineer for Haiti.

The challenge is as glaring as the bare yellow bulb of a makeshift street lamp, hooded by a scrap of tin, that lights up a dirt path in the Debrose 33 neighborhood on the side of a ravine.

Joseph Dessier, 47, now lives with his wife and five children in a shack cobbled together of tin, paperboard and a tarps in the yard of a former auto repair shop alongside neighbors who also lost their homes.

The camp’s residents power lamps, TVs, cell phone chargers and blow driers off a single line that somebody strung up from the ravine. Nobody is paying for the electricity.

So many people filched power that the grid would periodically overload the neighborhood transformer, causing it to blow. Two days later, a utility company crew would show up to fix it.

Utility chief Raphael said his biggest problem has always been the utility’s inability to collect from two thirds of its users. The utility has been running a deficit of about $80 million a year out of a $200 million budget.

Rebuilding Haiti’s power grid and expanding its generation capacity are among priorities — along with roads, water and sanitation — for an international donors conference set for late March at U.N. headquarters

“It’s going to take six months to a year to get the materials in here to build up the areas that don’t have power now,” said Myk Manon, an engineer with the U.S. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association who has been managing international efforts to restore electrical power. “In the meantime, a lot of people are going to be in the dark.”

Hospitals, embassies, government offices and other key facilities in the meantime will continue to be powered by generator, just as Haiti’s main businesses have always been. Manon says he will have to pull out in two or three weeks because relief donations are drying up.

He said wooden power poles are especially needed in this forest-denuded land, as are more crews of foreign volunteers; those from the neighboring Dominican Republic have gone home.

It has always been a major vat of political patronage, with three times more workers than needed, their productivity limited and skill level low, said Manon.

During a political crisis in 2004, the utility became financially crippled, throwing the entire country briefly into the dark. The U.S. government bailed it out with $20 million for diesel fuel that kept it running for 10 months.

The USAID engineer Paultre, a Haitian with three decades of experience grappling with infrastructure issues in this politically unstable land, says its electricity challenges, like so many others, can’t be solved overnight.

“The technical aspect can be addressed,” he said. “But the problem is a social one.”

Associated Press

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