TACLOBAN CITY – The regional capital and nearby towns welcomed the New Year in total darkness due to a 10-hour unscheduled power interruption because of a cut power line of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).
The blackout began at 10:11 p.m. Tuesday and power was restored at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday.
The NGCP said the widespread outage was caused by a cut conductor approximately two meters away from the insulators in Diit village in Tacloban City along the Babatngon-Apitong 69kV line.
In its 10:15 p.m. update, the NGCP said it had dispatched personnel to patrol the affected line and vowed to “expedite the resolution to the issue.”
Netizens flooded social media with complaints against the Leyte II Electric Cooperative (Leyeco II), the local distribution utility, demanding answers as the outage came while people waited for the New Year.
Leyeco II explained that the power service interruption was caused by faults in power lines by NGCP, the transmission service provider, and not lines maintained by them as the distribution facility.
“Tacloban experienced a yearlong brownout. It started in 2024, and it’s already 2025 without assurance of power restoration yet,” said netizen Ramil Uy in a Facebook post minutes after welcoming the New Year.
A Facebook page “iTacloban” with over 184,000 followers said, “People waited for the New Year, but a blackout came instead.”
Leyeco II has 90,000 consumers in this city and the nearby towns of Palo and Babatngon in Leyte province as of the end of 2023.
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