Darkness after Easter
Everyone woke up past midnight Easter morning not because they were preparing for mass early. Rather they were stirred by a blackout that plunged all of Mindanao into darkness for five hours.
The outage made people rant. Like this one who posted on Facebook that the blackout marred early church-goers from a good night sleep because of the unbearable summer heat. A friend of mine said he had to sleep on the rooftop with the company of mosquitoes. Another slept without taking a shower from a long Holy Week swim at the beach. Others headed to 24-hour fast foods where a generator and coffee and snacks gave them slight comfort.
The strange thing was how energy officials took long to explain how this happened. A long two days to point to a broken switch in the Agus-Pulangi hydro-power plant in Lanao. For years these hydro-plants have been due for maintenance yet officials thought of privatizing these plants, in contrast to demands from business sectors, electric cooperatives and consumers alike that government can do well to maintain this hydro-power plant that would serve the whole of Mindanao at cheaper rates. Hence, it’s a mystery that officials seem to look the other way on this matter. It’s the mystery of darkness.
But Gabriela Partylist Rep. Luz Ilagan, who is based in Davao, asked this: “Why is it that a power outage happens everytime Aboitiz would launch a new power plant?”
Indeed, when rotational brownouts plagued Davao City last year due to the long dry spell affecting hydroplants and maintenance of diesel power plants, Aboitiz announced that the 600 megawatt coal-fired power plant in Binugao, Toril would come in 2015 to address the shortage. We will say goodbye to brownouts in 2015, said one of Aboitizes’ executives in one session in the city council.
This power plant is reportedly going operational this second quarter. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), which is overseeing the power supply of the country, said this new supply of power would be in time when the El Nino is striking Mindanao since January.
But this raised concerns, and not just the doubts from Ilagan that blackouts are conditioned to welcome the need for coal. There’s the concern that coal may be effective in the short-term, but deadly and costly in the long term.
Journalist Germelina Lacorte in her report said that the government has approved 45 coal-fired power plants all over the country, with 13 of these in Mindanao. Citing reports, she wrote “coal is the world’s top contributor to global warming, and the leading culprit for climate change; and the Philippines has consistently been on the top 10 of the world’s
most vulnerable countries to climate catastrophe.”
Indeed, supertyphoons like Pablo that hit typhoon-free Southern Mindanao in 2012 and Yolanda that ravaged Eastern Leyte are indications of a weather gone berserk with industrial pollution as the main culprit. Yet, our government is paying no attention to this fact.
Dependence on coal, as her report quoted Pacific Coal Network of the Australia-based The Sunrise Project, would make consumers depend on coal plants for the next 30 to 50 years.
Looking locally, the Aboitiz plant sits in a 60 hectare area in the boundary of Davao City and Davao del Sur, where
a fishing village dwells.
This would mean that in the next 30 to 50 years, the biodiversity of a fishing and marine village would be affected. In the next 30 to 50 years too, residents especially near the plant would accumulate the harmful effects of coal such as lung diseases, cancer, toxicity in water and poisoning.
Why wait for 30 years to happen? Christ rose after three days in the dark.
Perhaps the Easter blackout is a reminder that God’s creation is being pumelled into darkness by human discovery of fast but dangerous technology.