Beach Road Pathway lighting contractor secures wires

The contractor doing the re-lighting project of the Froilan C. Tenorio Beach Road Pathway is now making sure the copper wire and other things they have been installing are more secure. The project faces delay after robbers took approximately 1,300 feet of copper wire last month.

RNV Construction project lead manager Jay Angulo said they had already welded the box that contains the copper wire including under the boardwalk to make sure there won’t be a repeat of the robbery.

“We replaced all the missing wires then we welded everything. That was the solution that we could think of to make things secure. The project has a one-year warranty, so if there’s a problem, we would be the ones to open the boxes and fix it,” said Angulo.

“It would be difficult to just open the pole boxes and those under the boardwalk using ordinary tools. You need special power tools for that. You need a generator in order for those tools to work, which would generate noise and attract attention,” he added.

“I would really admire this robbers if they could still manage to open the welded pole boxes and those under the boardwalk.”

Angulo said that he saw no problems when he randomly checked the same area at around 3am a few days after they replaced the stolen copper wires and welded the pole boxes.

He said that a partial re-lighting could have taken place if not for the robbery by still unknown suspects last May 28. “There was a plan of a partial lighting. All the accessories were there and we installed the lights but right now we have to redo everything.”

If the incident did not happen and had the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. already finished installing an additional transformer, and fixed the electrical enclosure, the area from Oleai Beach to Triple J could have been lit.

RNV’s timeframe to complete the project, not including the repairs and replacement of lampposts damaged by Typhoon Soudelor since it was not part of the original quote, was four months but Angulo said they expect it to be longer this time.

He added that they also had to look for another manufacturer of the lampposts since the ones that made the pre-fabricated poles was no longer operational.

It was Nilo Naval, RNV’s field supervisor, who discovered the theft on May 28 when they were about to resume their work that day. The stolen wire, the No. 6 since it is thicker compared to the No. 12, costs around $2,000. The theft might have happened between 12am and 4am.