Mob ransacks HESCO office after tragedy

Death toll from Thursday's PMT blast reaches six

HYDRABAD:

Enraged people attacked a sub-division office of Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (HESCO) as the death toll from July 22 transformer explosion in Hyderabad reached six persons on Saturday with the death of 12 years old boy Aarfeen Shakeel, a class five student.

The boy's body was brought back from Karachi, where he was under treatment, in the morning and was laid to rest after a funeral prayer at Akbari Ground.

Following the burial, the enraged people went on a rampage and set to fire the Rizvi Sub Division Office of Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (HESCO). They also threw out the office's furniture and fixtures on Autobahn Road and torched them as well. A sit-in protest was also held.

The protesters demanded arrest of the officers and staff of HESCO who were responsible for repairing and fixing the defected pole mounted transformer (PMT) of 200 KV which exploded in Latifabad unit 8 area on July 22, leaving 22 persons critically injured with burns wounds. Five of them succumbed to their injuries in around 12 hours after the incident.

The HESCO, on its part, has approached the police for registration of FIR against the people who assaulted the company's office. The other deceased included 33 years old Shujaat, 35 years old Tabish, 33 years old Waqas, 28 years old Noman and 45 years old Sajjad Qureshi were laid to rest on Friday. A rickshaw and three motorbikes were also burnt in the incident.

Inquiry

The Hyderabad deputy commissioner Fuad Ghaffar Soomro told The Express Tribune on Saturday that he has recommended to the Sindh government that a committee of technical experts should be formed to investigate the incident. "Although we have submitted the preliminary incident reports, the district administration and the police lack the technical expertise to conduct a thorough probe of HESCO's transmission failures and problems."

He said only a technical committee in which no officer of HESCO, which is an accused in the matter of the PMT blast, is co-opted should investigate the particular incident and the larger issue of repair of the PMTs.

"Reportedly, whenever any transformer develops a fault they are repaired in the local [private] workshops where the work is poorly done," he wrote in his July 22 incident report, submitted to the commissioner Hyderabad division for onward submission to the Sindh government. "This is usually done in connivance with the lower staff of HESCO."

He also pointed out that the consumers were left with no choice but to pay tens of thousands of rupees for the repair works which are supposed to be done for free by HESCO.

Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of HESCO Rehan Hameed and spokesman Sadiq Kubar did not respond to the query about submission of the company's initiated inquiry. The HESCO chief had formed a four-member committee with general manager operations Abdul Ahad as its head. It was tasked to submit the inquiry report by July 23.

The HESCO lacks reclamation workshops where such defected transformers can be repaired. In the absence of an official workshop, the private technicians repair the transformers and they charge tens of thousands of rupees which are paid by the consumers through the local staff of HESCO.

In the past the company used to replace the defective transformers with the functional ones. The repair of such defective units was done at the reclamation workshop of HESCO in Sukkur district.

Traders condemn

The Hyderabad Chamber of Small and Industry while condemning HESCO for the July 22 incident, has deplored that the federal minister Omar Ayub was briefed in detail about the transmission faults during his visit to Hyderabad. "But the result so far has been zero," Saleemuddin Qureshi, chamber's president, in a statement.

"When a private person was appointed the HESCO chief we began to hope for some improvement in the services. But, we are sad to notice that he also seems equally incapable like his predecessors."

He wondered why no one in the federal government is not taking any sincere steps to put HESCO on the right track of performance. He bewailed that in order to make some money the company's staff even get repaired highly defective transformers with little or no chance of repair.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 25^th, 2021.