Electricity is taken for granted in the U.S., but in Nicaragua blackouts are becoming a daily fact of life. The power utility claims that the outages are being caused by “a deficit in energy production, resulting from technical faults in one of the electricity generating plants.”. But no one on the street believes it — rumors are flying that the politicos are trying to negotiate a better with the Spanish company that operates the service. Whatever the cause, the residents of San Juan del Sur have gone without electricity for a major portion of the last few days. The blackouts are scheduled (in the rough way typical of Nicaraguan scheduling), so we knew yesterday that there would be no power last night.
We have been taking advantage of the massive generator Jane had installed at her hotel, which provides enough power to run the place through a blackout. But most of the town is not so lucky. We’ve also learned by experience that IBW, the telecom company that provides service to the hotel, has about two hours of battery backup on their transmission tower across town. So when the power goes out, we get about another two hours of Internet. The new WiFi router I installed for Jane on Monday has little impact when there’s nothing to connect it to.
The power situation has a direct impact on the prospects for library automation here. Any solution must take into account the possibility that electricity may disappear for hours at a time. Clearly backup power and/or supplementary manual procedures are a must.
Denise, Victoria, and I are all frantically preparing for the presentations we’re giving tomorrow in Managua at a conference sponsored by ANIBIPA, the Nicaraguan library association. (I’m becoming an expert at entering Spanish characters into Powerpoint.) Hopefully we’ll have a bit more time to post after that.