21-hour brownout angers Boholanos

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.

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.