STA. RITA, Samar — Lighting the picturesque San Juanico Bridge at night will finally be realized in May 2020 with the completion of a substation that will supply power to the aesthetic lighting project.
It was learned during the turnover last Saturday that the substation is now being built in one of the islets near the bridge that will power up the PHP80-million San Juanico Bridge Aesthetic Lighting Project and is up for completion within four months.
Samar Board Member Fe Tan-Arcales said there will be no further delay in the implementation of the project with the energization of the power substation.
“This was just a dream before to light this bridge, the first in the Philippines. This ceremonial energization is evidence that this is about to become a reality,” Arcales said.
The event is a manifestation of the united effort of the provincial government, the Department of Tourism, the Department of Public Works and Highways, and Tourism Infrastructure and Enterprise Zone Authority (TIEZA), she said.
The government has moved the completion target for the TIEZA-funded San Juanico Bridge Aesthetic Lighting Project from January 2020 to summer this year citing a lack of materials and delays in the delivery in the past few months.
Ferdinand Villanueva, operations director of Asiaphil Inc., the firm behind the construction of the PHP14-million power substation, said their project is now ready to energize the aesthetic lights to be installed by another contractor, Amigo Entertainment Technologies, Inc.
“The one mega-volt ampere powerhouse has its own automatic switchgear where we can tap to energize the lights. The substation is designed to withstand typhoons as strong as Super Typhoon Yolanda,” Villanueva told reporters.
The national government held a groundbreaking of the San Juanico Bridge Aesthetic Lighting Project on July 26, 2019.
TIEZA awarded the contract to Amigo, one of the country’s leaders in providing audio and visual technologies for commercial and industrial applications.
Samar’s provincial government will shoulder the cost of electric consumption estimated at PHP5.3 million annually.
The bridge’s transformation would be a new attraction under the Spark Samar, a branding campaign of the local government that was launched in 2015.
Once called the Marcos Bridge, the San Juanico Bridge was built in August 1969 over the San Juanico Strait, the narrowest navigational strait in the world that separates Samar and Leyte Islands, and was completed in December 1972.
The bridge, which spans 2.162 kilometers, was built as part of the Pan-Philippine Highway now called the Maharlika Highway, a network of roads, bridges, and sea routes that connect the islands of Luzon, Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao. (PNA)
