KOHAT, July 1: The unscheduled power outages continue to bring misery for the people from the past two months and the local Pesco officials, who often blame the outages on ‘major faults’ in the distribution system, failed to rectify them. The situation is getting unbearable for the consumers with every passing day as they have to bear 10 to 14 hours loadshedding almost daily. In some cases, after disconnection of eight hours when the electricity is restored at 7pm the ‘scheduled’ loadshedding starts from 8pm to 10pm.

On Thursday, the power supply remained cut off in the city-II and city-III regions from 10am to 7.37pm. On Tuesday last, the electricity supply in the city was disconnected at 9am and restored for two hours at 10pm.

It has been observed that Pesco has no loadshedding schedule at all. To make things worse, the Pesco phones at the complaint office and the grid station of the city were kept busy and even if one gets through the staff do not gave exact time when the power supply would be restored.

Officials at the Rescue 15 say that they continue to receive numerous phone calls daily about the Pesco officials not picking up phones.

The phone operator at the SDO office said that it was the job of the superintendents to take quick action after receiving complaints, but the duty officers do not pick up the phones intentionally. When contacted, the Pesco staff at the 118 complaint said that recently 90 linemen were appointed to solve the problem of long outages, but all of them got themselves transferred to their home stations.

Other officials said that the government should appoint local people as linemen who could perform their duties in Kohat.

Meanwhile, most of traders close down their shops in the evening, saying they could not afford to operate two generators, one for the family at home and the other in the shop.—Correspondent