December 12, 2006	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 20, 1427

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LAHORE, Dec 11: A questionnaire has been handed over to the three authorities responsible, who failed to keep Gaddafi Stadium’s floodlights on, during the third One-day International between Pakistan and the West Indies here on Sunday.

Chairman Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Dr Nasim Ashraf, who chaired the first meeting to probe into the power failure on Monday, asked the representatives of NESPAK, Philips, and the PCB officials, responsible for the floodlights system, certain questions.

Dr Ahsan Hameed, a PCB spokesman, said the questionnaire carries certain queries of common sense and all the responsible had been asked to give their respective replies within the next two days.

The PCB chairman, who left for India to attend the meeting of the host countries (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) for the 2011 World Cup, will hold another meeting to discuss the incident in the light of the answers.

Due to sudden malfunctioning of one of the six transformers, the international match had to be stopped on Sunday for almost 66 minutes, an hour before President General Pervez Musharraf was to come to the Gaddafi Stadium to watch the third ODI match between Pakistan and the West Indies.

A Wapda official Ramzan Ghumman disclosed that his department had been advising the PCB to purchase a back-up system for the lights to avoid any untoward incident, but the PCB was not ready to act on the advice.

Meanwhile, sources told Dawn that six months ago a summary was put up to the then PCB chief Shaharyar M. Khan, advising to change the bulbs of the poles, which cost in million of rupees.

However, the advice for the change was rejected, mainly due to cold war featuring some of the Board officials, on the ground that those bulbs only lit up for 500 hours since installation in 1995, whereas the age of one bulb is around 4000 hours.

Interestingly, the PCB officials were interested in wasting millions of rupees on changing the bulbs but gave no importance to the advice of Wapda.