By:
Leo Udtohan - 12:15 AM December 05, 2016
TAGBILARAN
CITY—Boholanos took to social media to vent their ire against a 21-hour power
outage that hit the province on Saturday.
Facebook user Van
Delima, a resident of Ubay town, said it felt like the province was back to the
“stone age era” when power was cut off.
“We Boholanos would
want to pursue what we call our own hydroelectric power plant,” said Delima.
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Another Facebook user
and Boholano, Dominic Aparicio, said when electricity was cut off, he simply
told himself it was an unscheduled commemoration of Earth Hour, during which
power users volunteer to unplug gadgets or turn off their lights.
“I just imagine it to
be Earth Hour,” wrote Aparicio in his Facebook page.
The National Grid Corp.
of the Philippines (NGCP), through spokesperson Betty B. Martinez, apologized
for the outage.
“NGCP sincerely
apologizes for the inconvenience that the prolonged power interruption had
caused to power consumers in Bohol,” Martinez said.
For Analiza Boaquin and
her family, the inconvenience took the form of having dinner in the dark on a
table lit only by a kerosene lamp.
The outage started at 4
a.m. on Saturday to give way for the annual preventive maintenance of the
NGCP’s 138-kilovolt Maasin-Ubay Line 2.
But in its advisory,
NGCP had said the outage would last only until 5 p.m. on Saturday.
Time passed, however,
and power has not returned by 6 p.m.
By 7 p.m., NGCP issued
another advisory to say that the outage would last until 8 p.m. The time came
but still, there was no power.
By then, most Boholanos
had already had dinner in the dark, as with the case of Boaquin and her family.
Boaquin said it was
difficult to move in the dark since she was feeding her 2-year-old-daughter,
Alay, without seeing the child.
She also said the
outage reminded her of the aftermath of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international
name: Haiyan) on Nov. 8, 2013, that hit the province three weeks after the
7.2-magnitude earthquake shook Bohol province and killed at least 200 people on
Oct. 15, 2013.
Some business
establishments with no generator sets in Tagbilaran, the provincial capital,
were closed. Other restaurants used candles but were forced to close at 5 p.m.
since it was getting dark.
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