ROLLING blackouts came to Bermuda yesterday as Belco began rationing electricity in the wake of the massive fire which caused island-wide outages this week.

At present, the blackouts are the only way the company can cope with the demand of delivering current to the City of Hamilton and to every residence on the island.

Two-hour rotating outages began yesterday and will be replaced with four-hour blackouts beginning on Sunday.

The new schedule will allow the City of Hamilton to gradually come online over the weekend and be fully functioning by Monday at 8 a.m., barring any unforeseen situation. King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and emergency organisations will not be affected by the new schedule. As well, care is to be taken to avoid any impact on restaurants or wholesale businesses outside of Hamilton.

"Rotating outages are necessary while Belco works to engineer the transfer of its generating plant capacity to the transmission system so that it can deliver power to the City of Hamilton and the rest of the island," company president Garry Madeiros told a press conference yesterday afternoon.

"Belco's generating capacity was not affected by the fire, but its ability to access that capacity was compromised."

He explained that Belco has generating capacity of 165 megawatts, but the company is only able to access 85 megawatts at present. Peak demand for this time of year is normally 110 megawatts. The rotating power outages were scheduled to make up that shortage.

"Until we can re-route the transfer of power, rotating outages will be necessary in order to meet the critical demand in the City of Hamilton during the day, and provide the residential community access to power during most hours and in mornings and evenings.

"We anticipate that this situation will extend through the middle of next week ? however, this can change based on our success in gaining access to our additional capacity."

The president added that the situation was also likely to change in the event of "any unexpected malfunction".

Thursday's island-wide blackout occurred shortly after 3 a.m., the result of a devastating electrical fire caused by a "catastrophic failure" on one of the company's five switchboards. The switchboard was in an 80ft-by-20ft room that also contained a 22,000-volt board, high-tension cables and 2,000 gallons of transformer oil.

The fierce blaze raged for five-and-a-half hours, requiring the efforts of 75 fire fighters at any one time to keep it under control.

By 7.30 a.m. electricity had been restored to small pockets of the island. However, it wasn't until many hours later that the majority of the population ? 90 per cent ? was back online.

With no power and few generators, the vast majority of businesses in Hamilton had to close for the day. Forced contingency plans saw some exempt companies head offshore to conduct business, while more fortunate residents were able to enjoy an unexpected holiday.

The energy disruption did bring some chaos ? long queues at gas stations caused significant road congestion and hardware and grocery stores reported a sudden burst in sales as people rushed to buy food and emergency supplies.

Premier Alex Scott spoke highly of the response to the calamity, effected amid "immense" challenges.

"We owe as a country, a debt of appreciation to many people, in particular the firemen who literally put their lives on the line for us," he said on Thursday. "It was a most intense fire ? it melted and bent steel beams. But we are now in a good place compared to where we were . . . we have to be patient because as a country, we are now being asked to work through a crisis. The message is very simple: patience, co-operation and conservation."

In the event's aftermath, company chiefs ruled out human error or excessive demands on the system as possible causes of the devastation. Calling it the "worst-case scenario", they said they had not planned for such a catastrophe. The cost of repairing the switchboard and the building which housed it, has been placed at close to $10 million. The process could take as long as 18 months.

At the press conference, Belco's chief operations officer Vince Ingham said the company had yet to determine the reason why the switching device had failed.

"We have not been able to access the building," he explained. "Yesterday, the structure was perilous ? I think it was around four o'clock (Friday) morning, that the roof of that building collapsed. (Later Friday) morning we had an insurance assessor attend the site. We now have permission to tear down that building which will enable us to clean up the building so we can start investigating."

Yesterday, Mr. Madeiros said those who had suffered longest without electricity would be the last to be added to the new schedule.

"The two-hour rotating outages will affect six circuits at a time," he said. "Customers who had their power restored quickly after the blackout will be the first included in these rotations. Conversely, customers who did not have power restored until late (Thursday) night or (Friday), will be included later in the rotation schedule.

"Restoring full power to Hamilton for the start of business on Monday morning is currently Belco's top priority. To direct power to the City by Monday morning, Belco will need to expand upon the number of circuits involved in the daytime power outages.

"We will begin preparing to meet Monday's City of Hamilton demand early Sunday afternoon, and will at that point begin implementing rotating outages of approximately four-hour duration. These outages will be broad in scope, affecting approximately 35 circuits, or one-third of the island at a time. The four-hour rotations will continue throughout the week, daily from approximately 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

"We will try to do it in a uniform matter but it depends on what types of issues and conditions we run into while this is taking place. None of this is a science. We can't plan for every abnormality."

He said the situation would be remedied as soon as the company's engineering team gains access to the extra megawatt capacity however: "We can't say right now when that will be. The long term is that this hopefully will not last more than until next Friday but it could be finished a lot sooner depending on our ability to restore."

In the meantime, the president stressed the need for conservation of energy and asked the public for patience.

"Conservation is important. (We must) reduce the uses of air conditioning, of water heaters and laundry ? anything that uses a large load because that provides us the ability to provide power to others.

"Conservation is not something we can lose sight of, at least not for the next two or three weeks as all of this unfolds. Peak residential demand for electricity is typically from 6.30 a.m. to 9 a.m., lowering demand during these hours is important. (We) urge residents to switch their patterns of electricity usage to off-peak hours."

"Patience is required of all of us. Try and reflect back on how patient and supportive we were during Fabian (in 2003). We need to help each other during this process."