Thursday, December 27, 2007 Wire thief blamed for Christmas power outage By Jay Dooma Balnig
THE thief of Transmission Company's (Transco) guy-wire should be incarcerated, but putting the entire blame on the thief is not justifiable said Transco District 1 Department Manager for Panay Rey Jaleco, in a press conference Wednesday.
Jaleco said during their troubleshooters' inspection headed by Engineer Lazi De la Cruz, they found out that part of the guy-wire, a cable that is buried to the ground and serves as support to the transmission post, was cut off by a still unidentified thief from Masaya, La Paz, Iloilo City last December 25.
Jaleco admitted that it affected the transmission of power from National Power Corporation's (Napocor) Power Barge from Bo. Obrero to the city's sole power distributor, Panay Electric Company Inc. (Peco).
He however said the one-hour citywide blackout should not be solely blamed to the wire thief since Peco had its lapses too in responding to the situation.
Jaleco said the Napocor, which tied up with Transco in augmenting Peco's power supply, only supplied 12.6 mega watts out of the city's demand which was 32.2 mega watts during Christmas.
NPC-Transco in other words supplied around 39 percent of the demanded power. Peco's power distributor, Panay-Power Corporation (PPC) according to Jaleco, provided the rest.
Jaleco said there was a problem with Peco's urgent transmission communication. He said PPC have enough power to provide the same day if only Peco immediately tapped the former.
"A blackout might have affected some parts of the city because of the incident but not the whole city because it was PPC that supplied most of the power not the Napocor," he said.
As to the thief, Jaleco said he could be penalized for violation of Republic Act 7832 or the Anti-Electricity and Transmission Line Material Pilferage Act of 1994.
