SUKKUR/ HYDERABAD/ KARACHI: A major power failure knocked out supplies to a large swathe of Sindh, including Karachi, on the night between Saturday and Sunday, leaving homes and businesses without electricity for up to 12 hours and millions of households without water.
The blackout caught residents of upper Sindh off-guard and threw their life routine into desperation, especially as their tap water tapered off, with no electricity to run the water pumps.
Heavy fog was blamed for the massive breakdown of the national transmission lines by the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC), Sukkur and Hyderabad power utilities.
Restoration of power supplies to many parts of upper Sindh and Karachi started by Sunday afternoon – from 2pm to late in the evening after it went off at 3am on Saturday. In some neighbourhoods of the metropolitan city, including Defence and Gizri, power was restored around 11am but most localities had to go without electricity until 3pm.
According to a spokesman for the NTDC, the 500KV transmission line from Guddu/Dadu tripped due to heavy fog, which caused a sudden overload to the electrical network of K-Electric (KE) and Hubco power plants, respectively, leading to major power outage.
He pointed out that the inclement weather in winter in the form of dense fog in tandem with low ambient temperature adversely affects the NTDC system, which causes such a major nationwide power breakdown that consumers have already faced in the recent past too.
“The sudden disruption of supply from the NTDC technically trips the entire system to which the power utility/generation companies of Karachi and Sindh are connected which includes K-Electric, as a major player,” he stated.
The NTDC power transmission to Karachi was back on-line around 2pm, by which time KE’s own efforts had undertaken the restoration of around 60% of city’s feeders, he said.
According to a Karachi Water and Sewerage Board spokesman the city would be deprived of 360 million gallons per day due to the electricity crisis. The localities, including Maripur, Gulbai, Pak Colony, Saddar, Jamshed Town, Keamari, Shah Faisal Colony and Karsaz, would be worst affected areas for the next two or three days.
Hyderabad
The power supply in all 12 districts in the region of the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (HESCO) remained suspended for 10 to 12 hours. According to Hesco spokesman Sadiq Kubar, the power supply went off at 3:48am. The restoration of the power supply began from 1pm on Sunday and it took Hesco another two hours to restore supply to the entire region.
Sukkur
Entire upper Sindh had to go without electricity from midnight of Saturday till Sunday afternoon due to heavy fog, as claimed by the Sukkur Electric Supply Company (Sepco) officials. Power supplies to all the districts of upper Sindh, including, Sukkur, Ghotki, Khairpur, Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Kashmore-Kandhkot, Naushahro Feroze, Larkana, Kamber-Shahdadkot and Dadu, remained suspended.
Sepco PRO Noor Ahmed Soomro said 132KV high transmission line had tripped due to heavy fog, which resulted in the long breakdown. He added that the reason of transmission line tripping was poor condition of the conductors and insulators, which have gathered dust and due to fog it becomes electrical current and results in outages.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 22nd, 2014.
COMMENTS (1)
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ
Heavy Fog to blamed for the breakdown. HEAVY FOG!! seriously?? As if electricity drives on the road to reach its customers and the fog caused severe accident of electrons that caused the disruption.
This is hilarious!! :D