August 06, 2007	Monday	Rajab 21, 1428

LARKANA, Aug 5: Power supply to almost half of Larkana city remained suspended for three hours on Sunday when a big transformer 20/26 at 132KV grid station developed some faults.

The patients in Chandka Medical College, Shaikh Zaid hospital for women, CMC children hospital (medicine and surgery) braved the hot weather as the hospitals had no proper alternative power support to face the outage.

The Hesco sources told Dawn that it was a ‘forced’ loadshedding for the huge transformer 20/26 as it was overloaded and engineers had to intervene and correct what it was described as ‘incoming’ fault.

Larkana experienced heavy load shedding on Saturday night also.

The city got power supply from Lodran gird station and after the burst of the transformer at Dadu grid station, Larkana was also temporarily fulfilling the electricity needs of Dadu, said the sources.

Apart from it the power theft in Larkana was on the increase and bursting of transformers has become a routine matter.

However, the unscheduled loadshedding on different feeders owing to overload was unavoidable, the Hesco sources said.

Under the prevailing conditions the existing big transformers of 20/26 installed at 132KV grid station were not enough to meet the growing demand of the areas, as there existed a yawning gap between the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ of electricity.