Rain damage: Parts of K-P plunge into darkness as 99 feeders trip

Peshawar residents spend restless night; power utility staff refuses to answer complaint calls

PESHAWAR: The management of the Peshawar Electricity Supply Company (Pesco) was apparently unaware that many areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) were without power since Sunday following heavy rain across the province.

The light went out around 2am on Sunday during a storm which, according to the hand out issued from the Pesco affected 99 out of 267 electricity feeders across K-P.

Besides Peshawar, Charsadda and Bannu district are connected with these 99 feeders.

Pesco Public Relations Director General Shaukat Afzal told The Express Tribune that power on 67 out of 99 was fixed while work was under way on the rest of 32 feeders.

Out of these 32, around 18 feeders serve consumers in Peshawar while the rest supply power to the areas out of Peshawar city.

Afzal claimed that Pesco had started fixing the feeders immediately after the rain stopped. “Technical team are not allowed to work on the transmission lines during rain owing to risk of electrocution,” he said.

In Peshawar, residents of Gulberg, Bara Gate, Cantt ,Kohat Road, Dalazak Road,Charsadda Road, Warsak Road, Landi Arbab were left without power.

Consumers said that no one was picking the phones at the Pesco complaint centres. Perturbed, people started calling news channels to express their ire over the apathy of power utility service staff.

A resident of Gulberg, Anwar Khan, told The Express Tribune that he did not sleep the whole night and kept trying complaint numbers of Pesco that remained engaged.

When Gulberg’s executive engineer was contacted in the morning by The Express Tribune, he said he had just woken up and came to know that there was fault in the electricity supply.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 1^st, 2017.