Cable glitch causes four-hour blackout in Western, Central Visayas

Problems with a submarine cable triggered a four-hour blackout that left residents in parts of Western and Central Visayas hot and irate late Wednesday. The blackout hit most parts of Negros Occidental and some parts of Iloilo and Cebu, a report on Visayan Daily Star (www.visayandailystar.com) on Thursday said. The blackout started at 4:26 p.m. with the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines, which runs the country’s power grid, managing to restore power at 8:45 p.m. The power outage stemmed from the shutdown of the Leyte-Cebu submarine cable lines 1 and 2, Central Negros Electric Cooperative general manager Sulpicio Lagarde said. It was a transmission problem and not a power supply lack, he added. Marine cables linking the Leyte geothermal power plant to the rest of the Visayas was affected due to a suspected line fault on the Cebu side at 4:26 p.m., Zosimo Briones, NGPC’s Negros district head. But before Wednesday's blackout, Bacolod City in Negros Occidental experienced power outages due to the lack of power supply from the Palinpinon Geothermal Power Plant. - RJAB Jr., GMANews.TV