THE WAY BRACO WORKS (by Freekicker - Sept. 2002)
There is an old joke that you must be an engineer if the highlight of your tropical cruise was the tour of the ships engines room. As my long-suffering wife will attest, it is ever so true. I design the mechanical and electrical "innards" of large buildings. Both professional and personal curiosity leads me to start snooping around every place I stay to see how it "works". Braco was no exception. For those of you who are curious, read on, but be forewarned - like sausage, it is sometimes better to not know exactly how it is made.
Electricity -
Braco gets its main power from the Jamaica Public Service Company, the national electric utility. The power comes underground from high voltage lines just to the south of the highway to the main service and switchgear in the main electrical building along the service entrance road, about 200 yards west of the main entry. You can recognize the building from the two large generator exhaust stacks sticking through the roof. Utility power is supplied at 4,160 volts, 50 hertz. All power is metered, then distributed underground from there to various transformers scattered about the complex. These transformers are usually non-descript metal boxes hidden in shrubbery in the back areas.
With hurricanes and the lower grid reliability of developing nations, Jamaica has several power outages each year. In rural areas, the power can be out for days at a time. To keep the resort going, the electrical building also houses two 500-kilowatt CAT diesel generators, also set to generate at 4160 volts. Together, these generators will create enough power to operate the entire facility if the utility grid goes down. These units do not start automatically. Maintenance staff must come out to the generator building, start the generators, let them warm up a few minutes, then manually throw the main transfer switches to switch Braco from utility power to generator power. The entire generator facility was in first-class shape. They had all the same sophisticated generator power management hardware found in the US. The generators were immaculately maintained and appeared to have been regularly exercised. You could have eaten off the equipment room floor. This especially impressed me because this is not an area usually accessed by guests, and I had just dropped in unannounced while on a morning jog. It usually takes a combination of first-rate management and worker pride to keep these types of areas so clean.
The transformers scattered about the facility then step down the power to either 120/240 volts, or 120/208 volts. I did not do enough digging to find out which, and by now you're probably bored enough about the electrical stuff, so we'll move on to everyone's biggest complaint....Hot Water.
Hot Water -
The bulk of my hot water research was on the A/N side where I was staying, but it appeared all blocks on both A/N and textile sides used the system concept. The source for our block's hot water was in the utility closet at the bottom of the stairwell. Housekeeping used this room a lot and left the door open - perfect for curious guests like me to probe. Inside, I found a 200 to 300-gallon hot water storage tank. It was fed by a single residential-grade 4 kilowatt electric water heater. Ah Ha! It would appear the building designer's theory was that a small water heater for 25 rooms would suffice if there was a big enough tank. The big tank would feed hot water for morning and evening showers, then re-charge during the day and late night hours. With 50 guests/block and 250 gallons of hot water, that's 5 gallons per guest. The weakness to this concept, however, is once the tank is depleted, a 4 kilowatt water heater can only generate about one-half gallon per minute of hot water - not even enough for a single shower. Most of the showers at Braco appeared to be low-flow 2 gallon-per-minute type. If you are the unlucky guest to take a shower right after the tank is depleted, you'll only get tepid water.
Though imperfect, this system is probably the best that could be done, given the realities of a spread-out campus of small buildings such as Braco. Bigger electric water heaters would impose a huge load on the electrical power system and overload the emergency generator system during extended outages. It would be impractical to use centralized oil-fired boilers or heaters, as it would take too much expensive buried hot water pipe. Natural gas isn't available, and propane water heaters would probably be more expensive to operate than electricity. The bottom line - if your wing has hot water early in the morning, but runs out as the morning wears on, don't bother complaining - you're probably just out of luck. You're getting a shower using the next system to explore - cold water.
Domestic cold water
Cold water comes from the local municipal supply. You can see the main water tank on the hill to the southeast of the resort. I suspect the resort may have developed the supply and the locals tapped into it. A substantial part of northern Jamaica, as is much of the Caribbean, sits on a limestone formation. This limestone is porous and naturally filters water as it slowly seeps down to the water table. The Braco system taps the ground water in the limestone formations. This means there is little chance for the water to be contaminated from fecal coliforms from surface water. A little chlorine and it is as safe and clean as any of the better water systems stateside. This is similar to the limestone water formations on the northern Yucatan peninsula that feed the Cancun area and Chichen Itza and used by the Mayans for centuries at sinkholes.
Still, water is a precious commodity. The golf course is not irrigated with domestic water. It uses "recycled" water, which leads us to the final leg of this behind-the-scene technical journey –
Sewage waste disposal
Most water-borne illnesses in 3rd world countries come from poor/non-existent sewage treatment. Braco has its own treatment plant, located next to the generator building. I didn’t learn the exact nature of the treatment process, but it must come close to the stateside standards of at least secondary treatment with chlorination, as they use the effluent for irrigation. Yes, all those sprinklers watering the golf course are spraying treated sewage. And the lined pond water hazard in the middle of the course is the storage reservoir for the effluent. If you walk around the course and examine it closely, you’ll see the pipe that brings the water over from the plant to the pond, and the pump that pumps the water to the irrigation sprinklers. The good news – no effluent is released to the lagoon or ocean, so there is no possibility of contaminating the local shores. Just don’t play in the sprinklers!