My occasional efforts to understand the BVI infrastructure makes me believe cost to install is considered way more important than cost to maintain. Is Belmont service underground or on poles? All the distribution pole transformers I have seen outside of Roadtown have been 200kva that can serve maybe 8 or 10 houses at most. They should all have a fused cutout to protect them from lightning strikes, overloads and suicidal squirls and make maintenance easier with minimum interuption. Any other place in the world you should be able to pull the cutout to isolate that transformer and shut power to just those few houses. Sounds like they have to shut down the entire high voltage side.