Darkness fell on Panay and Guimaras Islands. We don’t mean literally, of course. But if you have been paying attention to the news you will know that massive power outages left those islands without power for four days last week.
News footage showed highways in literal darkness, lit only by the headlights of passing vehicles. Each vehicle was practically an accident waiting to happen, but thankfully there seems to have been no reports of such. By day we can only imagine how many establishments and homes had to do without power. Imagine sweltering in the heat that has become all year round.
The outage allegedly happened after several power plants tripped at once. Power consumers, as well as the Senate, are blaming the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) for what happened. They said the NGCP should have made sure there were enough safeguards in place to prevent the blackout.
This editorial isn’t about pointing fingers at NGCP. There are enough people who want to lay the blame thick on them already. What we want to ask is if there is a plan by our authorities here to avoid something like this.
Cebu is lucky enough in these times to have a stable power supply. In the ‘80s, it was a different story. It would be rare for a week to go by without a brownout. Sometimes there would even be several power outages lasting all night within that same week.
Thankfully the power issue was addressed in the ‘90s. Cebuanos wouldn’t see serious power interruptions unless it was brought on by massive damage to the power grid like what happened in typhoon Ruping in that same decade and then later on with typhoon Odette just several years ago.
But because we have stable power supply now many businesses can no longer function without it. Imagine if we suddenly had to contend with loss of power for several days or longer as a result of whatever caused the disruption in Panay and Guimaras.
Let what happened there be a cautionary tale. Because life, the weather, and other forces beyond our control can be unpredictable, we should have a plan to remedy the massive power outages that may happen.