Power outage hits Nueva Vizcaya

BAYOMBONG, Nueva Vizcaya — For the fourth day this week, this capital town suffered a power outage a brownout triggered by a substation of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines that broke down on Wednesday afternoon.

The brownout affected 61,512 Bayombong residents (15,194 households).

NGCP linemen have managed to restore power to half of this municipality as of Saturday after three days of troubleshooting in Barangay  Busilac here after the 1:25 p.m. unscheduled power interruption hit parts of Ifugao and Nueva Vizcaya.

Malou Refuerzo, NGCP-North Luzon public affairs officer, said the outage affected line segments connecting Bayombong to Lagawe town in Ifugao, as well as the Nueva Ecija towns of Bambang and Quezon.

Power to all the other towns were restored earlier, she said.

The Nueva Vizcaya Electric Cooperative has employed a load-sharing scheme to allocate electricity to sections of Bayombong at certain hours of the day while repairs on the NGCP substation continue.

“However, (residents must) conserve power for the meantime to ease the load of other Nuvelco substations. We do not want another breakdown as this will affect the whole province of Nueva Vizcaya,” according to Maria Victoria Martinez, who heads NUVELCO’s membership development office.

She said NUVELCO work crews have been monitoring the substations in the towns of Gabut, Bambang, Solano and Villaverde to prevent these equipment from overloading while NGCP troubleshoots the Busilac substation in Bayombong.

“A sub-station is the heart of every electrical power system,” Martinez said.

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