ISLAMABAD: Three top officials of the Guddu Thermal Power Company have been suspended over the major power breakdown that plunged a large chunk of the country into darkness for several hours on Friday.

“Investigations into Friday’s power outage indicate that due to negligence and a lack of coordination on the part of Guddu Power Plant management, the 220-500kV Step-Up Grid Station at Guddu was overloaded and [caused] tripping of the Northern Transmission System,” said a statement issued by the Ministry of Water and Power.

Read: National power grid survives major breakdown

Action has been initiated against Guddu Generation Company’s Chief Executive Officer Rukhsar Qureshi, resident engineer Maula Buksh and senior shift engineer Mohammad Momin. They have been placed on suspension and would be proceeded against “under the rules”.

An official said that the government would launch a formal departmental inquiry into the ‘negligence and lapse’ by appointing an inquiry committee or an inquiry officer, as the case may be, to probe the matter thoroughly by collecting evidence, technical data and computer records as well as providing an opportunity to officers concerned to explain their position.

Further action would be taken after the completion of the departmental probe, he said.

Also read: Blackout fuels rumour mills

On Friday, nearly all of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as parts of Sindh and Balochistan faced a major blackout, but the government had attributed it to a fault at the Tarbela and Ghazi Barotha hydropower stations, that are managed by the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda).

The statement on Sunday, however, suggested that the fault had nothing to do with Wapda but originated from the Guddu Station, which is hundreds of miles from the Northern Transmission Line.

Published in Dawn December 15th , 2014