PESHAWAR: After enduring over 24 hours of sweltering heat and sleepless night without fans, power consumers finally heaved a sigh of relief on Thursday evening as workers of the Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) restored power supply to the city from the Rehman Baba grid station.

The grid got shut down after developing a fault as protesters switched on feeders serving scheduled loadshedding.

A spokesperson for the Pesco told Dawn that the power utility had to resort to load management in several parts of the city after one of the grid’s three transformers developed fault following the protesters’ interference in their working.

He said that throughout the day, Pesco’s technical staff kept working on the damaged transformer and managed to repair it on Saturday evening. He said that testing of the repaired transformer was underway at present and the full power supply to all 32 feeders would start shortly.

Fault caused grid to shut down

Another official requesting anonymity told Dawn that the damaged transformer was supplying power to eight areas of the city and its load was shifted to the remaining two working transformers, which caused inconvenience to the power consumers.

The suspension of electricity from the grid station had affected more than 72,000 consumers on 32 feeders.

Rehman Baba grid station, which is located on the Ring Road area of the city, has turned into hub of ongoing power protests in provincial capital. On Friday, a group of protesters, led by a ruling party lawmaker, barged into the grid station and forcibly restored the power supply to the feeders undergoing scheduled power cuts.

On the other hand, residents of Torghar district also demanded of the high-ups of Pesco to end daylong power outages in the district.

“The tribesmen have regularly been paying their electricity bills, but the Pesco suspends electricity supply to us in scorching heat,” Shah Nawaz Khan, the provincial Joint Secretary of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s Culture wing told reporters.

Flanked by a group of locals, he said that tribesmen in the merged districts were facing acute power outages in that hot weather where mercury surged to 40 degrees Celsius.

He said after talks with district administration, local tribesmen recently paid Rs1 million to the Pesco but even then they were facing the daylong power cuts.

· The local PTI leader reminisced that the people of Torghar had rendered great sacrifices for the construction of Terbala dam as their entire agricultural land, and even the graves of their ancestors were buried under its reservoir, but they were still facing terrible load shedding by the Pesco authorities, he regretted.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2024