Albay declares state of calamity

Evacuation in Albay (Photo courtesy of Gov. Joey Salceda’s Facebook account)

LEGAZPI CITY — The Sangguniang Panlalawigan of Albay on Saturday held a special session and passed Resolution No. 109-2014 declaring the entire Province of Albay under state of calamity due to Typhoon “Ruby” (international name: Hagupit).

Ruby is expected to hit land at Borongan, Samar at about 8 p.m. Saturday and batter Masbate province, which is about 70 kilometers from Legazpi City, at about 10 p.m.

The provincial government of Albay has been evacuating residents that would be under any or more that one of the five threats that would be brought about by Ruby, whose classification has been downgraded from super typhoon to and an ordinary typhoon.

These threats are strong winds, floods, mud and lahar flows, storm surges and landslides.

Albay has been declared by the weather agency as under Public Storm Warning Signal No. 3.

Meanwhile, National Grid Corp. of the Philippines personnel had been working to restore power transmission service after an outage hit portions of Albay province as of 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

Power consumers of the Albay Power and Energy Corp. had been affected by the outage due to a customer-owned pole that leaned over the transmission.

Normal operation resume after work completion at about 1:35 p.m., the NGCP said.

The power transmission company restored power in Albay after re-energizing the Tiwi-Malinao-Tabaco 69kv transmission line.