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Outages blamed on austerity measures
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Posted on Sep 28 2004
Austerity measures were blamed yesterday for the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.’s poor maintenance program, which has resulted in recent power outages.
The CUC power division reported yesterday that outages experienced at Feeder 2 and Feeder 4 areas since last week are caused by a combination of power distribution and generation problems, which in turn result from deteriorating equipment.
Power division manager Diego Babauta admitted that most of the problems were old. They, however, are recurring now mainly because the power division has not been able to follow its maintenance schedule due to cost-cutting.
Babauta noted that maintenance requires people to work overtime, but CUC’s standing policy reserves overtime work for emergency situations only.
The no non-emergency overtime rule was part of the June 24, 2004 memorandum issued by CUC executive director Lorraine A. Babauta directing all CUC managers “to immediately implement cost-cutting measures and tight expenditure controls.”
CUC board members, however, stressed during a special meeting yesterday that maintenance personnel should be allowed to work overtime to put necessary preventive measures in place.
“If people are needed, then they should go out there. We should not wait for an emergency before we let our people work,” said board member Joe Torres.
His colleague Allen Perez agreed. “Don’t worry about the cost. Let’s just figure out a picture-perfect situation. Let [the board] worry about the funding,” Perez said.
For his part, CUC vice chair Herman P. Sablan tasked the management to provide recommendations on how the power outages can be eliminated.
“Why do we [the board] have to brain-storm all this? We need solutions; you have to come up with recommendations we can look at,” Sablan told the management.
Unscheduled power outages were experienced at Feeder 2 and Feeder 4 areas over the past week.
Areas covered by Feeder 2 include Garapan, Beach Road to the San Jose traffic light, Puerto Rico, and Chalan Laulau down to Quartermaster Road.
Feeder 4 areas include Sadog Tasi, Capitol Hill, Wireless Ridge, Denni, Agag, As Teo, Kagman, and portions of Papago.
