DOE: 1 year to restore electricity

MACTAN ISLAND, Cebu, Philippines - – Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho Petilla sees power restoration efforts in Leyte lasting up to a year.

“We are looking at initially two months, but as we see the extent of the damage, we are suddenly looking at more than six months,” he said. “It could take one year.”

Speaking to reporters, Petilla said Leyte, the hardest hit area when Super Typhoon Yolanda battered Central Visayas before the weekend, can be likened to Hiroshima after an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city in World War II.

“The damage is so bad,” he said.

Petilla said the transmission lines of the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines and the distribution lines of electric cooperatives and utilities are not just down but “crumpled.”

“It will be longer than all the outages that we have experienced because of the magnitude of the problem that we have there,” he said.

Residents of Leyte might have a dark Christmas, he added.

Petilla is working with other agencies in assessing the extent of the damage to determine how to deal with the power failure.

“We are asking the National Electrification Administration (NEA) to conduct an immediate assessment on the situation of distribution lines and investigate if there is a need to provide generating capacity in the form of generator sets,” he said.

The Energy department may have an initial assessment by the end of the week, he added.

Petilla said options include renting modular generator sets from private suppliers to be funded using a portion of the multibillion-peso Malampaya fund or through a loan from the NEA.

To date, the government still has untapped P137 billion worth of Malampaya funds, he added.

Petilla said bodies are still scattered in some parts of the province, and that some towns remain out of reach of aid and relief efforts.

Petilla said people are looting as they have no food and water, but that lawlessness is slowly being contained.

“Everybody will have to help in the rehabilitation,” he said. “It’s a super typhoon that requires extraordinary solutions. In other words, it’s one of a kind.”

Petilla said fuel supply may be tightened today and tomorrow because the existing supply is running out.