Power shortage to affect water supply — MCWD
WITH more brownouts expected in Cebu, the Metropolitan Cebu Water District (MCWD) has set up contingency measures in order to ensure a continuing supply of water for their consumers.
But even with its contingency measures in place, MCWD still advised the public to store water.
“It will be to their advantage if they store water although we will ensure minimal effects as much as possible,” said MCWD General Manager Armando Paredes.
“As much as possible, everyone should store water especially in higher areas. We, in Metro Cebu, are lucky our problem is just water for baths, but in northern parts, they really need water for drinking,” added Ernie Delco, MCWD assistant general manager for operations in a press briefing yesterday.
During a meeting with MCWD yesterday, representatives from the Visayan Electric Company (VECO) committed to provide MCWD with a daily schedule of their rotating brownouts in order for the water district to prepare generator sets for their wells.
“It is cumbersome on our part so we asked for their daily schedule of rotating brownouts although it will only be tentative for us to identify which wells will be affected at what time. This is for us to be able to deploy our mobile generator sets to these wells even before the schedule,” Delco said.
MCWD has almost 160,000 consumers in Metro Cebu.
MCWD sources 95 percent, equivalent to a volume of 195,000 cubic meters daily, of its water supply from groundwater wells, which use electricity to pump water from the aquifer.
VECO earlier said they are 85 megawatts (MW) short of their power supply because the Leyte-Panay-Cebu grid has a shortage of 160 MW due to damaged transmission lines from their Leyte power supply.
This forced them to implement rotating brownouts starting last Monday.
Meanwhile, MCWD has extended help in supplying water to northern Cebu towns affected by the typhoon.
“We have delivered a couple of generator sets to the Bogo Water District. We also deployed one of our water tanks to deliver water to the affected towns,” Delco said.
Their water tanker, which has a capacity of 8,000 liters, is used to deliver water to Daanbantayan and Medellin towns.
MCWD also committed to help VECO’s Interruptible Load Program for the benefit of other CEO consumers within its franchise areas.
MCWD will use, from time to time, its generator sets in the Jaclupan and Talamban well fields to lessen usage of power from VECO. “This will result to a contribution of 1.2 MW if both facilities will use generator sets at the same time. To further help VECO, MCWD will also use VECO power to fill up its water reservoirs during off-peak hours,” Delco said.
