ISLAMABAD, Oct 12: Two inquiry reports of the government have accused Wapda’s top brass of being negligent about system reliability and stability and held two officials responsible for the September 24 countrywide power breakdown.

In an official announcement, Minister for Water and Power Liaqat Ali Jatoi said on Thursday it had received two reports on the power breakdown.

The inquiry reports held Wapda responsible for not completing two 500-kv alternative transmission lines in time that would have restored electricity within minutes after technical fault in the national grid. The ministry, however, did not fix responsibility for the delays and indifferent attitude of Wapda top management but said ‘displeasure on this is being conveyed to the authority.’

The two reports, Mr Jatoi said, also noted that Wapda did not have any standard operating procedures and the management had not reviewed system stability, protection and operations for a long time. Wapda has been directed to conduct its complete angiography through an international consulting firm to check its system configuration, security protection and stability conditions.

The ministry said that ‘after reviewing the reports, it has been brought out that for the specific event (September 24 breakdown) the responsible persons are National Power Control Centre (NPCC) Chief Engineer Azhar Masood Panni and General Manager Salahuddin Rafahi.’

The two officials had been suspended and their cases would be dealt with according to rules which envisaged issuance of charge-sheet to them, he said.

The reports noted that additional line such as 500kv line from Rewat to Lahore was awaiting completion due to no-completion of line bays, a transformer was pending commissioning at Rewat and the Muzaffargarh-Gatti line was also delayed.

The statement said: “It has been learnt that proper authorisation of the outage of one 500kv Ghazi Barotha-Lahore line was not taken and appropriate arrangements for re-distribution of load and generation were not made. This rendered the whole system in a precarious power balance which was disrupted by a system fault. As the power system had no margin for contingency, the fault resulted in cascaded tripping.”

Sources in the enquiry teams told Dawn that the NPCC had time and again informed the Wapda top management of lack of adequacy and contingency arrangements.

They said it was almost a tradition in Wapda to take emergency decisions sometimes in split seconds in good faith to save the system and no written approvals were sought for emergency outages.