Rural, suburban areas remain without power

Following a major system breakdown, power supply could not be restored to several rural and suburban areas of Punjab till Sunday evening.

Routine life and public services, including internet and cellular services, metro train and industrial production, was disrupted in various areas, causing serious inconvenience for citizens.

A resident of the provincial capital, Kamran Khan highlighted that there had been no electricity and water supply in his neighbourhood for almost 12 hours. “We registered numerous complaints to the power utility company but nobody is telling us when the electricity will be restored,” he maintained.

Another resident, Muneeb Javed, complained that power supply in Mustafa Town area failed around Saturday midnight. It could not be restored till Sunday evening. He also pointed out that citizens were also complaining about unscheduled power outages in the city.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, an official of the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) said that technical teams were trying to restore power supply but it would take several hours. Engineers were trying to identify the fault in Guddu Power Plant which plunged the entire country into darkness.

As per the federal government direction, the company was trying to restore electricity supply to all provincial capitals and big cites, he revealed. Power supply will be restored in rural and suburban areas in a phased manner, he added.

He also pointed out that the company had already constituted a high-level committee to probe into the incident. He, however, indicated that short circuiting of main transmission lines could be one of the reasons of the major power breakdown.

An official of the Lahore Electricity Supply Company (LESCO) said the entire power system had not been restored yet, so the company had to do some load management. The company has temporarily suspended power supply to independent feeders and some industries to ensure supply to domestic consumers as per official directives.

Punjab Mass Transit Authority (PMTA) General Manager Operations Syed Uzair Shah said that the Lahore Orange Line Metro Train (OLMT) service remained suspended for over four hours owing to the power supply failure. He said that the authority started the metro train operations at around 10:15am after a delay of four hours and 15 minutes.

Similarly, an official of one of the major telecom operators disclosed that mobile phone and internet service in several areas of the province was still suspended as power supply could not be restored in various regions of the country.

Criticising the authorities responsible for provision of electricity supply, former power minister Awais Leghari tweeted that the entire country had been pushed into darkness owing to negligence of WAPDA and the NTDC. “Such power failure is a result of incompetent government,” he said and added that if standard operating procedures (SOPs) were followed and funds were properly used for maintenance of the transmission system, such incidents could be avoided.

He said, “Let’s not take this #blackout as a routine or a technical jargon; this is a very serious failure of the maintenance system on the part of WAPDA and NTDC. This breakdown caused unimaginable losses to be borne by the poor citizens of this country. During fog the dust absorbs water, which causes short circuiting in the main transmission lines. Due to the short circuiting, the system trips and has a cascading effect, and resultantly the national system collapses.

He tweeted in capital letters, “We must all know that huge funds are allocated every year to these organisations only for this purpose because the losses caused by this avoidable phenomenon are extremely high.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 11^th, 2021.