Dear friends, as I have mentioned to you before, the utility systems here on Guam are quite antiquated, and are constantly in need of repair. Longtime residents here know that our local government and its various agencies are to blame, because they are wasteful, rarely proactive, very poor on maintenance, and major procrastinators.
The situation was already bad enough before Typhoon Mawar struck our island in May 2023. Sadly, the typhoon just emphasized the problems we already knew exist here, and exacerbated some of them, namely our power grid problems.
So according to the Pacific Daily News article link included below, we can expect load shedding — or temporary power outages — to continue for another six to nine months while they continue to make repairs on our island’s power generators. Some of these generators are literally years past their recommended power generation capabilities. As a result, they are falling apart constantly. Thus the need for constant repairs to them.
The end result is that since Typhoon Mawar, basically, just about every day, my power goes out for an hour, sometimes unexpectedly, even though they do publish an outage schedule. Sometimes the power goes out twice in a day. This is because the remaining generators are simply unable to generate enough power for the entire island, particularly during peak usage hours during the late afternoon and evening.
As you can imagine, this situation is very frustrating, to say the least; not only because these power fluctuations, surges and outages can damage my electronic equipment — I have lost two external backup drives over the years — but also because the outages make the Bill’s Bible Basics ministry unreliable for my online friends who are trying to read things on my website. The almost four months that I was offline due to Typhoon Mawar no doubt caused me to lose a lot of my online followers. It is time-consuming to build back up a following. But there isn’t much that I can do about it other than to grin and bear it.
But if the truth be told, I suspect that we will continue to have serious power grid problems beyond 6 to 9 months, and that load shedding will possibly continue until the new 198-megawatt Ukudu power plant comes online. They are saying that will happen around January of 2026. However, knowing how things work around here, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more delays, and the new power plant doesn’t come online until well after that. We shall see.
So, if you happen to click or tap on any links in any of my social network posts, and they don’t work because you are unable to access the Bill’s Bible Basics website, I ask you to please be patient, and try again in an hour or so. God bless you, and thanks so much.