LEGAZPI CITY, Philippines – Palarong Pambansa has been hit with a handful of power outages in some billeting areas and playing venues.
The most recent one was on Tuesday, April 12, at past 7 pm. It plunged the Albay-BU Sports & Tourism Complex in darkness, interrupting the football game between Eastern Visayas and Mimaropa for about 5 minutes.
According to Marlon Loterte, LGU head for media and communications committee for the Albay Palarong Pambansa 2016, the outages were not scheduled.
After speaking with the Albay Power and Energy Corporation, he said the recent power outage was traced to a problem with a post in the Taysan area. However, they could not yet confirm what caused the outage.
Loterte gave assurances that the power company had not scheduled any outages or post repairs for the duration of the week-long Palarong Pambansa, and that they were looking to immediately address or restore power should an outage happen again.
During the press conference on Monday with Lorete and Tonisito Umali, the assistant secretary for legal and legislative affairs of the Department of Education, the problem of power outages was brought up.
Umali and Lorete promised they would look into it. So far, there has been no more brownouts reported in billeting areas.
Umali said they would take into consideration the suggestion of having a power generator on standby as one of the contingency measures.
Aside from the football game earlier, the gymnastics competition was also interrupted by a short power outage on Monday. – Rappler.com