Prospects are dim for Haiti utility

February 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Six 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.

It is starting almost from scratch.

The state-owned Electricite d’Haiti, like the government, is essentially broke. Fewer customers than ever are able or willing to pay. Their jobs disappeared along with their homes in 30 violent seconds.

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.

Then 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.

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 in New York.

Until then, without additional emergency funds, little can be done to further restore service on a hobbled distribution network. Power poles and cables still lie snapped on streets all over town.

“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.”