I just checked on the Meralco website to see if they learned anything from the Milenyo experience. Nope. It doesn’t look like it.

They know they their service area could be headed into another emergency. Why don’t they set up their website as blog temporarily so that people can check in on what’s going on?

They could be blogging from their “trouble room” (the main dispatch area handling issues that crop up during a storm). They could be alerting us first to any outages in other parts of the country - like Bicol. And then as areas of metro Manila get hit with outages, they could be blogging that.

If you’re in one of those areas [without power and thus internet] does that do you any good? Yes. Others, maybe family members living elsewhere, can find out what’s happening and the prospects for recovery, the severity of the damage, and be keeping you abreast by text messaging.

Meralco is in a unique position to be providing this information. They have trucks with radios and offices with radios throughout the metro region. They know what’s going on.

People want to know what’s going on - or even if nothing’s going on. What a huge public service Meralco would be doing by blogging this and what a huge public relations benefit they would get.

I simply don’t understand their inability to get this.