KARACHI: “K-Electric [should] leave the job of supplying power and start selling pakoray. At least your shop won’t have to close when it rains,” someone tweeted on Twitter after several hours of a widespread power breakdown across the city on Friday.

But what the person wasn’t aware of was that the outage was not connected to rain or loadshedding. The K-Electric claimed that the reason for the citywide power outage was a breakdown of the 500kV National Transmission Dispatch Company (NTDC) Wapda circuit transmission lines.

A KE spokesperson explained that due to the transmission lines’ sudden tripping, KE’s generation plants and extra high-tension transmission circuits were temporarily rendered ineffective. A sudden loss of significant generation caused a major gap between supply and demand. Due to the unexpected interruption of about 650MW supply from the national grid, KE’s generation system was suddenly overloaded, resulting in the massive breakdown.

“The power went off soon after Sehri at around 5am in our neighbourhood,” said Mrs Hidayat, a resident of Defence Phase-I. “Since it was on the hour we assumed that it was part of some new KE loadshedding schedule and as they say that they don’t carry out loadshedding during Sehri and Iftari, we thought 5am suits them just fine. It was only when power was not restored even after a couple of hours that we realised it must be something else,” she said.

“KE shouldn’t be doing such things. First of all it is so hot and humid and then this is the month of fasting as well. Even the devil is locked up during this month but the power utility is out with their evil designs of creating hell here by switching the power off,” said Ashraf Khan, a resident of Mehmoodabad.

“We like the rest of the city also lost power around Sehri time. Power was restored at around 3pm but now we don’t have any water in the tank as there was no supply today. Also the TV is off as the cable is not working. I presume there is still no power at the cable operators,” said Syed Mehdi Hasan Shah of Federal B. Area.

Acute water shortage in city

The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board also issued a statement early in the day about the reason behind not being able to supply water to the city. “All our pumping stations have been experiencing prolonged power breakdowns. Dhabeji lost power at 6am, Gharo at 4am, Pipri at 5.15am and NEK at 7.25am. The back pressure caused due to this at Dhabeji resulted in damaging the 72-foot main line and supply to the city was cut off.”

So besides overhead water tanks running out of water due to the electric water pumping machines being devoid of power, the underground water tanks also remained empty.

The KE besides apologising to the citizens for the inconvenience said that its engineering and operations teams immediately sprung into action and they started the normalisation of its downstream feeders soon after the outage while using its own resources to normalise supply to its network. Gulshan, Gulistan-i-Jauhar, Federal B. Area and North Nazimabad were the areas where power restoration took place first. Learning of this one resident of Clifton, Nadeem Shams said that most people beyond the Clifton bridge saw their power restored much before the residents of Clifton and Defence. “This is because KE thinks that everyone in the supposed posh areas have generators and UPS. I don’t have such luxuries and was made to suffer for hours without end,” he complained.

‘Breakdown helps KE to save Rs500m’

KE’s labour union in a sarcastic message to the media said that depriving the people of the city of electricity for 12 hours on Friday helped KE, which is always requesting people to turn off lights, etc., to save at least Rs500 million. “More such chances will help us save billions more,” the message read.

The general secretary of the KESC Shareholders Association, Choudhary Mazhar Ali told Dawn that the problem may have started there but such widespread outage was not really NTDC or Wapda’s fault. “I will still blame KE for this as it is plain incompetence on their part for letting something like this happen in the first place. It could have been easily prevented had they had the expertise and equipment to do so,” he said.

“For starters KE decommissioned two 25MW units a while back, thinking that they were of no use any more. But when there is such a tripping they need at least 10MW to back start or jump start the system. In the absence of the extra units, KE had to ask for power from Hyderabad,” he explained. Choudhary Mazhar also pointed out that the breakdown or tripping of transmission lines at NTDC happened due to frequency variations. And frequency variations occurred with the change in pressure of water in hydro power plants. “There are ways of balancing out the flow of electricity by generating power from oil or gas in such instances but for that to happen you need to first know about the imbalance and KE doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to do that,” he concluded.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2014