Brown out, black out, power outage; whatever you want to call it. I’m down at Blue Mango and sure enough, the generator is running. Supposedly for 2 months, the power will be out daily.
How does this happen? After a typhoon, they can get it up after 5 days but now the entire island is without electricity for 2 months, every day, during peak usage times.
Isn’t this supposed to be the crown jewel of the Philippines? The pinnacle of all tourism efforts both local and abroad? Akelco is allowed to raise and lower its rates without notice…now the power company can simply cut off power?
I seriously suspect a bullshit decision that benifits certain fuel distributors here on Boracay, Aklan, and where ever they come from. Thats a lot…a LOT of fuel thats going to be used by the resorts. I suspect that someone noticed the increase in sales duringthe typhoon.
Can you guess what happened last night? hmmm…here’s a hint - it fits into a certain theme on here. I was updating a bunch of posts that I had saved as drafts accidentially and sure enough, at 19:45 pm the power went out again. It was off for only an hour this time but it pretty much threw off my night. I started watching an old movie called Altered States on te laptop battery supply so when the brown out was over, I wasnt motivated to do anymore work online.
Another thing at that I got my electric bill yesterday and it was a whopping 6,800 pesos for one month! What the hell ?!?! I’m walking down to the meter in a few minutes to see if it really says that and to se if it looks like anyone has been getting into my line. I cant see how we could possibly use that much electricity - especially with all the black-outs! A bunch of thieves, thats whats been going on around here.
Its not enough that Boracay has a brown-out every day but now there are these weird power surges and drops. Down in the dive shop, appliances have been blowing up. In the house here we have gone through three extension cords, an external hard drive, a camera charger, two cell phone chargers, a soldering iron, a hot-glue gun, and a set of bed sheets. All destroyed from these power fluctuations. Well, the bed sheets were burned when a drop-then-surge caused an extension cord to catch fire on the corner of a bed.
There is one good thing though, well its not so much good as it is just a lack of bad weather. By bad weather, I mean ‘normal’ hot and humid weather here. I don’t know why Filipino travel sites extol the virtues of vacations here during the summer. They use terms like escape to Boracay during the sizzling hot summer days. I’m thinking..uh-huh, its more humid here than in the cities and much clearer skies (read: hotter). But recently, there has been a lack of hot weather…oh its still hot at times but we have been having daytime and nighttime storms and the coolness has been accumulating a little bit to where I don’t use the aircon for most of the night.
But anyway, back to the power surges. A surge is always bad but most modern appliances can handle it. Even computer cords. These, however, are drops in voltage then you can hear in your fans and air conditioners that it starts fluctuating up and down really fast and finally spikes upwards before settling down. Not good.
And another thing to complain about while I’m at it: this has been going on for years from what I’m told. Do they sell surge protectors here? Not a single one to be found! I went to the only electronics shop on Boracay and two of the three staff members didn’t even know what I was talking about. Very nice people, but not very electronics knowledgeable. (dont ask them for a 200 gig laptop drive with external enclosure, they don’t have a clue what youre talking about and will try selling you a desktop IDE model).
It doesn’t stop. Another brown-out. Didn’t they used to be called black-outs? Is it a power outage? Is there a reason like over consumption? No, its not that as told by the government itself a while back. The trunk cables under the channel can only carry so much power and they keep blaming it on the over development of Boracay by insisting that we are using too much power at the same time.
Really? golly, just how much power is getting used on a cool and comfortable night at 0400 in the morning? Yea, I didnt think so, but yuppers, thats when the power went out this time. Four in the morning. At least it only lasted a few hours and the weather was nice for a change.
