SUKKUR, October 12 Entire Sukkur city plunged into darkness on Monday night following severing of power to the grid stations by the regional control center, Jamshoro, increasing the load-shedding duration from eight to 12 hours.

It may be mentioned here that people of Sukkur are braving long hours of outages since long who get no respite even if the PEPCO announces an end to load-shedding, as according to the local authorities, grid stations were over loaded, thus load-shedding was all but necessary.

Although, the weather has considerably changed and people expected a reduction in the duration of load-shedding and today it happened otherwise without being notified to the general public or media.

When this correspondent contacted at local grid station, an official came up with a reply that a fault had occurred in the main transmission line, therefore, power supply to entire grid station had been suspended, but hastily shifted the onus of responsibility to the regional control centre, Jamshoro.

At regional control center, Jamshoro, however, an official without disclosing his identity, told this correspondent that the duration of load-shedding had been increased for upper Sindh, from ten to 12 hours, without assigning any reason for it.

The Hyderabad-based media manager for the Hesco chief executive officer Sadiq Kobhar expressed his ignorance about the increased hours of load-shedding and said he would let Dawn know the exact position after talking with the concerned officials.

When contacted again, Mr Kobhar said that some fault had crept into the KSH-1 breaker near Guddu power station, due to which power supply to Jacobabad, Thull, Kandhkot and Sukkur was suspended and the position remained unchanged till the filing of this report.