The Recent Brown-outs

Electrical power outages - known as brown-outs in Philippines - are not uncommon events, but here in Sibulan we've seemed to have been having more than our regular share this month. For the past ten days or so, we've had at least one, sometimes two, every day.

Not so many days ago, the scuttlebutt going around was that the increase in the number of brown-outs was due to damaged transformers resulting from an earthquake the first week of July. I wasn't buying into that because most of the damage from the earthquake was in Leyte with hardly any tremors being felt on Negros.

Today, while driving out to the property in Magatas I spotted workers, in two locations, putting up new power poles. One on the old Magatas road, and another where the new diversion road meets the old road.

I suspect that this new project could somehow be related to our outages. I don't know how long this work has been going on along the diversion road, and while this seems reasonable to me, we're in Philippines, after all, and the real reason for the recent brown-outs could be something totally unreasonable.