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August
August
Boracay Gets 10 Hour Power Outage
2 comments Posted in: UncategorizedTagged with boracay, brownout, daily happenings
Sunday morning, at 6:00 am on the dot – electricity goes out. After a short wait, it’s clearly not coming back on and several nearby resorts start their generators. The power company says it’ll be back on at 16:00 (4 pm) and sure enough, the power comes back on exactly 10 hours later at 4:00 pm.
Even though there was a nice breeze and it’s not sweltering, ten hours is still a long time to be without electricity on a jungle island that the government goes to great lengths to promote as “world class”. Think about that for a few seconds….. when any other tourism destination looses electricity for a while, it makes CNN. When some trailer park in Oklahoma looses power for half a day because a backhoe clipped a cable, its on the news. When part of Jakarta looses power for 3 hours due to a small substation fire, its in the news. One part of manila lost power for 4 hours one day over a simple lack of supply and it was in the Philippines news for the whole week. Boracay looses power for most of one day and nobody says a peep.
Enough with the grumpiness and on to my lighter side of this event. The freezer is defrosted, kitchen cleaned, fan and inside air conditioner units fully disassembled and cleaned, outside aircon evaporator vanes brushed and washed, and I cleared out enough empty bottles to start a recycling center. Sweated huge volumes and didn’t drink anything but water and Gatorade, got enough exercise to feel worn out that night. A nice muscle pain of having accomplished something for a change.
I keep track of the power outages on Boracay just for personal reference. They commonly, and incorrectly, use the word ‘brownout’ which means there’s more demand than supply of electricity. That is not often the case. Normally it’s scheduled cut-offs for maintenance and repair, other times its equipment failure… but not lack of power. You can tell a brownout by the pulsing dropping of power then a final drop. Most of the time, its just an instant cut-off.
When the power goes off on the hour and the power company tells you when its coming back on… no sir, that is not a brown out, thats a black-out. They tend to start during low-usage times and increase during non-peak season, further proving my theory. Its a good thing they’re upgrading the system, but having been on the project for supplying electricity to the Green Zone it confuses me why its getting worse each year, not better.
2 Responses
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All that money coming into that island and they still have all day long outages. And they had the nerve to compare that place to Phuket a while back. Boracay will never be a Phuket.
Sep 4, 2010 at 6:02 AM
nope, it will never be that nice. Or civilized. hell… lets go for broke and include general cleanliness of the entire society.
Sep 8, 2010 at 9:21 AM