LAHORE: People in most parts of Lahore faced a great deal of inconvenience as power supply could not be restored or was erratic by 10pm on Friday.

Officials of the National Power Control Centre (NPCC) and the Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) kept claiming that power had been restored.

People initially had no clue to the extent of the fault or breakdown and many believed it to be part of the government’s strategy to impose blackout during the PTI’s protest in Karachi. The television channels also went off air and people ran out of alternative sources of power – generators and UPS gadgets.

“It was also a total breakdown of information,” commented Muhammad Ali, a resident of Gulberg. As people could not watch television channels, no one knew what had happened. The extent of the breakdown only started dawning on people after three to four hours. Even then, rumors spread across the city as some of the PTI supporters claimed that “the government has engineered a breakdown to deprive Imran Khan of coverage of Karachi shutdown.”

However, by evening news started trickling that some major fault on some transmission line or powerhouse had caused an almost national breakdown, he said.

By afternoon, most of the city was also without water as the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) could not refill water tanks due to absence of power for its tubewells.

Public facilities like banks, too, suffered as their generators ran out of fuel. “We had hardly imagined and prepared for such a long breakdown. We were unable to serve our clients as we ran out of backup for our computer system,” said Muhammad Amin, a banker.

“The most telling impact was on Wapda House, which had to reduce working hours because of power crisis,” said an official. Most employees left the building by 3pm knowing it would take many hours to restore the system,” he said.

“Even big businesses cannot afford to keep running on generators for more than 10 hours,” said Liberty Market trader Muhammad Asif.

Published in Dawn December 13th , 2014