KARACHI, July 21: At least one-third of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation consumers lost their electricity when a technical fault occurred in the early hours of Monday.

Sources working in the centralized complaint centre of the power utility told Dawn that the power breakdown, which had started an hour after midnight continued till Monday afternoon in quite a few cases.

They added that they had been deluged with calls from distressed consumers who wanted to know when the power supply would be finally restored. “The only problem was that we had not been informed how long would it take for KESC engineers to rectify the fault. We had no option but to tell the irate consumers to wait and see when the power supply would be restored,” they admitted.

Meanwhile, a resident of Landhi-4, Zamanabad, Sector 36-B, called Dawn at around 9.30pm to say that his locality had been without electricity for the past five hours. “When we called the localized complaint centre, we were told that all KESC vehicles were out at the moment. The KESC staff also told us that the fault would be rectified by the next shift,” he said.

A spokesman for the KESC said that Karachi faced a sudden power shortage of 634 megawatts at 1.24am on Monday as both the KESC-WAPDA Jamshoro circuits which supplied 500-600 megawatts electricity tripped, delinking the city from the national grid, adds PPI.

The spokesman said that safety circuits of nearly 150 power supply feeders automatically shut the feeders off due to lack of electric supply at 19 out of 54 local gird stations.

He said the KESC transmission engineers at the load dispatch centre were vigilant and immediately activated the standby power generating units to reduce the power shortage to 460 megawatts by adding 174 megawatts to the system.

The engineers and staff posted at the KDA-Jamshoro link also reconnected the two circuits. However, the national power control centre allowed the KESC to resume the required quantity of electricity from the national grid by 4.00am when the power supply to the entire city was normalized, he added.

During the period, the city faced power shortage, equitable power supply was maintained by rotationally shutting off some areas while continuing supply to the rest of the city, the spokesman said.