LAHORE, Jan 5: Loadshedd-ing continued affecting life in the city for the seventh day on Saturday, rendering flour mills, most filling stations and tubewells non-operational resulting in acute shortage of flour, CNG and water.

Flour was not available on shops in Sanda, Sherakot, Jhugian Nagran, Kot Kamboh, Mohlanwal, Faisal Town, Misri Shah, Wassanpura, Faiz Bagh, Ghoray Shah, Karim Park, Datanagar, Mustafabad, Darogawala and Mariam Colony.

Owners of general and departmental stores at Allama Iqbal Town, Township and Green Town said they were not getting flour from anywhere.

The manager of a departmental store near Iqbal Town’s Moon Market said he had gone to the mill from where he used to buy flour, but they had not even a single bag.

A spokesman for the Lahore Atta Chakki Owners Association said all the 2,000 or so members of the body had some stock of wheat. He said they were ready to operate their machines any time, but a number of their members had complained that they got low voltage whenever electricity was supplied.

A senior officer of the Utility Store Corporation told Dawn that people started queuing up outside the outlets as early as 6:30am for flour. He said till 10am people had bought all the 25,000 bags of 20-kilo they had at the outlets.

CNG was the most sought commodity after flour as most filling stations were lying closed on Saturday. Long queues of vehicles were witnessed outside CNG stations that have generators.

At places like Lower Mall, Samanabad, Gulshan-i-Ravi and Shadman, salesmen would wait for 10 to 15 minutes before filling up gas in a vehicle while some were telling customers they could not give them more than Rs100 gas because of low pressure.

“Usually a seven-kg cylinder is filled up in three minutes or so if the gas pressure is normal. But if the pressure is low, it may consume 15 to 20 minutes,” said Ashfaq, a Lower Mall filling station worker.