MANILA – A party-list lawmaker on Thursday said Congress should intervene in the recurrence of power outages in Iloilo City as it already affects the city’s efforts to combat the coronavirus disease (Covid-19).
AKO BISAYA Party-list Rep. Sonny Lagon cited the case of the Western Visayas Medical Center (WVMC) sub-national laboratory, wherein the hospital’s Covid-19 testing was hampered due to a shift to time-consuming manual work whenever there were power outages.
Lagon has filed House Resolution No. 785, which seeks a probe into the status of the distribution of electricity and widespread power outages in Iloilo City.
“Ang concern ko lang talaga is yung mga consumers ng Iloilo, na sana hindi sila ma-apektuhan, lalo na ngayong pandemic. Ang problema ko talaga kasi is yung mga long brownouts na nangyayari (My concern really is for the consumers in Iloilo to not be severely affected during this pandemic. The problem here is the long brownouts that are occurring),” Lagon said.
“There is a need for the House of Representatives to look into this to ensure that the supply of electricity in Iloilo City will not be affected and that the people of Iloilo City shall not suffer,” he added.
Dr. Stephanie Abello, the chief pathologist of WVMC sub-national laboratory, said a long brownout happened over the weekend that disrupted their work on backlogs, hindered their goal to perform 1,000 tests, and forced them to do manual extraction.
“We cannot utilize our automated analyzers because of the low capacity of our generator. So we were able to test a maximum of 400 only last Sunday,” she said.
"So we really need a continuous and stable power supply. As of now, we already requested a new generator set with a high capacity compared to the existing one,” she added.
More Electric Power Corp. (More Power) earlier said the power interruptions in the city were due to "preventive maintenance work" on substations, transformers, and cables in the city after discovering the "alarming conditions" of the distribution system.
More Power said this was inherited from the old power distributor, Panay Electric Co. (PECO), whose franchise expired last year.
In its statement, More Power said it found high levels of dissolved gas due to the degradation of oil and paper insulation in various substations in the city,
It also claimed that PECO had failed to implement new capital expenditures for the last 10 years for improvements and upgrading of the facilities.
PECO, however, denied its successor’s allegation, saying it invested a PHP1.8-billion asset base throughout the life cycle of its last franchise from 1994 to 2019. (PNA)
