KARACHI, June 22: Power breakdowns continued to plague the lives of the consumers of the Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation on Sunday, despite the fact that it was a holiday.

Calling from Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Block-4, a very irate KESC consumer said that her locality had lost electricity the previous night. “All the night, we kept on calling the centralized complaint centre and regional complaint centre, but the telephone numbers of these complaint centres remained engaged. Somehow, we managed to make a call to the regional complaint centre in the early hours of Sunday and lodged a complaint. However, when our power supply was not resumed by the Sunday afternoon, we called the complaint centre again,” she said. The lady attendant at the complaint centre told her that no complaint had been lodged previously from this address.

Another resident of Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Block 13-D-2 said that frequent power shutdowns had forced them to stay awake the previous night. “We spent more time without electricity than we did with electricity. All our plans of having a nice weekend were marred,” he said.

A resident of Defence, Phase-VI, told Dawn that his locality had not received power supply the previous night. He said that calling his regional complaint centre at night had always been useless, because either nobody picked up the phone or it remained engaged all the time.

A resident of Golimar told Dawn that the previous night the pole-mounted transformer of his locality had developed a fault. “A wire also fell off after emitting some sparks. As the naked electric wire on the street was very dangerous, people drove to the complaint centre for immediate remedy. However, the KESC vehicle came to our locality after five hours. We have to watch over the wire for five hours so that nobody touch it. At least in such emergency conditions, the KESC should not ignore the complaints,” he added.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Malir Town urged the governor, chief minister and city nazim to take serious notice of the frequent power breakdowns in the town.

In a joint statement, Haji Muhammad Ayoub Baloch, Mohammad Ishaq Jokhio, Haji Allahdino Jokhio and Haji Mohammad Hassan said that due to power failures, the residents of Malir Town were also facing water shortage. They stated that after the brief rainfall three days back, the power supply had not been restored.