A town called Kananga

The town is part of the Eastern Visayan province of Leyte, a rustic community of some 43,000 souls struggling to break away from the suffocating grip of poverty. Its youth see little opportunity for advancement, with only one percent of elementary school children able to pursue college education.

Being in the direct path of destructive typhoons that regularly visit the area, the province offers no incentive for big business to set up manufacturing plants that would generate jobs for Leyteños. Unemployment rate is a dismal 15 percent in Kananga itself, whose residents depend mainly on subsistence farming for livelihood. Very few possess the employable skills sought by bustling business, industrial and export-oriented establishments in neighboring Cebu province, for instance. Average household income is a mere P10,000 to P15,000 annually.

There is one saving grace for Kananga, however. It hosts the geothermal complex owned by Energy Development Corporation (EDC), the second largest producer of geothermal energy in the world, next only to the United States.

The company operates the Unified Leyte Power Plants that provide electricity for Leyte, Cebu, Bohol, Negros, Panay, Biliran, Siquijor, Samar and part of Southern Luzon. Its Leyte Geothermal Production Field supply the steam used for power generation by its Unified Leyte Plants and by the Napocor-owned 112.5-megawatt Tongonan geothermal power plant.

Kananga Mayor Elmer Codilla saw the presence of EDC not just as a source of jobs and tax revenue for his town, but indeed, as a full partner that can assist in the overall social and economic development of his town. He approached EDC President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Aquino and asked if the company could establish a technical and vocational training school for Kananga’s youth.

What happened afterwards was a propitious meeting of the minds. It turned out that Aquino himself had been thinking about such a project as part of EDC’s corporate social responsibility program. It seems he got the idea in a talk with his friend, Albay Governor Joey Salceda, who said that since the Bicol and the Visayas regions are both located within the typhoon belt, big-time investors would have reservations about putting up industrial and manufacturing plants in those areas. Salceda told Aquino that education is the only viable option for people in the two regions.

The result was the establishment of the Kananga-EDC Institute of Technology (Keitech) which is now in the final stages of completion in a three-hectare site within the 12-hectare EDC airstrip in Barangay Rizal. This is a tripartite undertaking among EDC, the Kananga municipal government, and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).

Aquino envisions Keitech as a world-class training center that will offer post secondary, competency based technical and vocational education for its students. A body called the Kananga-EDC Educational Foundation will run the school, with EDC and the Kananga LGU sharing the annual operating and maintenance expenses and the cost of software components on a 50-50 basis.

However, EDC alone will shoulder the cost of constructing all the buildings, dormitories, workshops, computer labs plus the electrical and water installations, all costing close to P80 million. Over its three-year development period, total cost of the entire facility will be P108.24 million.

Keitech will start operating this school year with an initial batch of 120 students for the first year, adding 48 students more each year until the target of 240 trainees is reached. Initially, the school will offer three major training courses. These consist of Construction, Metals and Engineering and Tourism, Health and Social Services. A staff of 25 instructors will conduct the training over a period of 10.3 months and trainees will be awarded National Certification upon graduation.

The students will be housed in separate dormitories for boys and girls and the school will shoulder all expenses for food, uniforms, bags, shoes, socks, school supplies, reference materials, insurance coverage and even toiletries and personal necessities. A bus will fetch the students from the Kananga town plaza every Monday morning and brought to the Keitech campus where they will stay until Friday afternoon, when the same bus will bring them back to the plaza. Each student will receive a P100 weekly allowance to take care of transportation expenses from their respective residence to the town plaza.

In keeping with its envisioned world-class status, the foundation will provide Keitech with imported machineries and equipment. All of these, including tools and reference materials, will be brand new. The school includes a Job Placement Unit that will establish linkages with possible employers for the benefit of its graduates.

It would seem that for all intents and purposes, the student-trainees will practically be living a pampered life. I believe that the aim of all these is to provide each of them a worry-free environment conducive to focused learning and the eventual transformation of Kananga into a progressive community.

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Incidentally, I am informed that the EDC’s Malitbog power plant played a significant role in the speedy restoration of electricity in the Visayas after the area was hit by a region-wide power blackout Saturday, April 25. This is the biggest power facility in the company’s Unified Leyte plants mentioned here that include the Upper Mahiao, Mahanagdong and Optimization plants. Malitbog is said to be the only plant capable of blackstarting the power grid from the Leyte side and it was through this plant that power was promptly restored in the Leyte-Samar-Bohol-Luzon and the Leyte-Cebu lines.

The blackout was traced to a disturbance along a transmission line in Tabango town, some 28 kilometers away from the company’s geothermal complex, well beyond EDC’s area of responsibility. This resulted in a line-to-ground fault and caused the Leyte-Cebu line to trip, cutting off power supply to the region.

In spite of this line-to-ground fault, the Malitbog plant was said to have sustained the disturbance and still provided power to the Leyte-Samar-Bohol-Luzon grid. EDC attempted to re-energize the entire system but it turned out that the line-to-ground fault had not yet been remedied. This triggered the tripping of the Malitbog plant itself and caused the transmission line to trip again.

The company also clarified that while it was undertaking meter calibration and maintenance work at the time the power outage occurred, this had nothing to do with the blackout. It explained that the power system consists of two parallel lines. EDC’s maintenance work, it said, was being done on Line 1 while the tripping happened along the Leyte-Cebu Line 2.

Were it not for the disturbance along Line 2, which is outside the EDC geothermal complex, the system could have sustained the power supply even if Line 1 had been shut down for maintenance purposes, it was explained.

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