The electricity supply to Burewala city was restored on Wednesday with the help of alternative transformers but about 140 villages of the sub-district remained plunged in darkness, more than 36 hours after the Burewala grid station fire.
The Multan Electric Power Company had earlier said that supply to all the villages and Burewala city would be r partially estored within 48 hours. According to a Mepco estimate, almost 500,000 people are still without electricity.
The fire had erupted on Monday night as a result of a short circuit.
On Wednesday, a Mepco spokesperson also revised the estimate of the loss sustained in the Monday night fire from Rs8 million to Rs12 million.
The five people, including the grid incharge, who had been injured in the fire were discharged from hospital. All five had been unconscious and had burn injuries at the time they were rescued. Doctors treating them at Deen Medical Complex, a private hospital in Burewala, said they had fainted from the smoke. The men, said the doctors, had sustained burns on less than 10 per cent of their body and were out of danger. Muhammad Yousuf, the grid incharge, on Wednesday said that the short circuit could have been caused by lizards in the main box.
The lizards, he said, could have caused the wires to get mangled up bringing negative and positive charges in contact. A company spokesperson said that the short circuit had caused meters to catch fire, which had spread to transformers. The fire in the transformers burnt control panels of six grid feeders in the Azeem gird station. Rescue officials were able to extinguish the fire after four hours.
Aftab Bhatti, the Mepco executive engineer (Planning and Inspection), told The Express Tribune that an inquiry had been ordered into the incident to confirm the cause of the fire.
Rao Zulfiqar, an executive engineer in the Sahiwal division of the company, told The Tribune that complete restoration of electricity could take more than 96 hours.
Zulfiqar said that the fire had damaged a number of T-2 transformers, control panels of grid feeders and other expensive machinery.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 1st, 2012.
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