KARACHI: Electricity played hide-and-seek the entire day on Wednesday after the tripping of a 220kV transmission line that led to the tripping of K-Electric Bin Qasim power plants a day earlier.

A KE statement said that their management team and engineers worked throughout the night at rebooting the system and were even able to resume power in many pockets of the city at around 1am. However, as soon as Bin Qasim units were back on line, tripping occurred in the supply system in Sindh, which hindered delivery not only in Karachi, but also in parts of Balochistan.

“First the voltage dropped and by the time we ran to the kitchen to switch off the fridge and deep freezer to save them, there was no electricity. That was exactly at 9pm on Tuesday evening. Although power was resumed at 10 minutes past midnight, it was gone again at 1am after which it would be resumed for one hour and be gone for the next throughout the night until things stabilised at around 8.30am,” said a resident of DHA phase II. Another resident of F. B Area said that he was sick and tired of complaining about outages to the KE on their given numbers and only wanted to speak to their top management.

“I am done complaining through the proper channels. It doesn’t work. Now I am seeking KE chairman Tabish Gauhar or their CEO Tayyab Tareen’s contacts so that I could explain to them directly how much we suffer during their so-called crises,” he said.

“First their system collapsed when they couldn’t handle the added load and demand for more power during the hot weather and now there are these new excuses. Maybe other parts of the city got back on line sooner, but power was resumed in our area, Korangi, after 11am on Wednesday. We had Sahri in complete darkness. It is not fair, especially in the final days of Ramazan,” said a housewife calling in from Korangi Crossing.

Meanwhile, Karachi wasn’t the only city affected. Outages also occurred in Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Jamshoro, Hub, Uthal, Bela and Vinder and this, what was described as, ‘cascading effect’ compounded challenges. Giving details, a KE team said that the sudden disruption of supply technically tripped the entire system to which the power utility/generation companies of Karachi and Sindh were connected.

KE CEO Tayyab Tareen stated: “The NTDC came back on line early morning at around 5am and by that time the KE had gone into ‘island mode’ having started the revival of its own generating units.”

He added, “After the revival of NTDC’s 500KV line, different areas of Karachi were back on line within a reasonable span of time.”

The KE media spokesperson also added: “We apologise to our valued consumers for the issues caused by this breakdown and assure the public at large that the KE has made every effort to rapidly resume service to them — with zeal and commitment and especially in challenging and unforeseen circumstances like these.”

Published in Dawn, July 9th, 2015

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