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| March 12, 2002 | Tuesday | Zilhaj 27, 1422 |
Three dists without power for six days
KOHAT, March 11: Hundreds of thousands of Wapda consumers in the three districts of Karak and Hangu and parts of Kohat in the NWFP and Mianwali in Punjab are without electricity for the last six days, and the concerned authorities have been unable to replace or fix the fault in the main transformer in the Lachi grid station which was damaged due to fire on Tuesday last.
Hundreds of villages in the Karak, Kohat, Hangu and Mianwali districts have been affected by the complete breakdown, and in some areas people were faced with immense hardships due to shortage of potable water supplied by tube wells. The hospitals, schools, and offices have also been badly hit by the problem.
The Wapda authorities transported a heavy 15 MVA transformer from Dera Ismail Khan on Monday after engineers failed to fix the 10 MVA old and damaged transformer.
The XEN, Wapda told Dawn on Monday that the aging transformer had developed a fault as a result of fire and would be sent to Lahore for repair. However, arrangements have been made to restore power in the affected parts within 24 hours. He said that the installation of new transformer would take at least a day or two as it required dehydration.
He said that on emergency basis power supply has been restored to Lachi city but large parts of Karak, Hangu, Kohat and Mianwali were without power.
The engineers when contacted disclosed that the dehydration and making the new transformer completely functional required five days.
For at least two days the new transformer would be put on trial without load and then it would be connected with main line.
Rain could also affect the dehydration process during which the temperature of oil is raised to 50 degree centigrade to remove the humidity inside before putting load on it.
The people of Hangu and Karak districts, however, complained that Wapda did not bother to make any emergency arrangements to supply electricity during the last six days.
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