KARACHI, March 12: The city suffered a shortfall of 30 million gallons of water from the Indus source in the wake of a power breakdown occurred at Dhabeji's Phase-II pumping station on Friday.

A spokesman for the KWSB said that pumping of water to the city from Dhabeji's Phase-II station remained suspended for more than six hours in the absence of electricity. Power supply at the Phase-II station went off at 7.05am and it was restored at 1.15pm on Friday, causing a shortfall of about 30 million gallons, he added.

Water supply to the city from Dhabeji pumping station was disrupted twice during the last four days owing to power failures, which occurred at the pumping station. Earlier, the city had suffered a shortfall of 61mgd on March 9 when a major power breakdown had occurred at the Dhabeji pumping station.

However, a spokesman for the KESC said that as a matter of fact no power failure had occurred at the pumping station. Power supply to the pumping station was affected when an 11KV cable was damaged at the KWSB's end and it was the responsibility of the KWSB to get it repaired.

However, he added, since the KWSB had no technical expertise in repairing such cable damages, the KESC officials repaired the damaged cable free of cost for restoring pumping of water from the affected station.

The KWSB officials said that though it would not affect the overall supply of the city, some areas would get scant supply while the tail-end areas would receive the supply with a low pressure.

CLOSURE: The KWSB official said that water supply to all the areas of Orangi, Baldia and Site towns would remain suspended for three days (from March 15 to 17).

The closure was being applied to facilitate repairing works of the leaking pipelines passing through Banaras Chowk.

The KWSB spokesman, however, said that the normal water supply to three towns would be restored on March 18. He requested all residents of the affected towns to conserve and store water to meet their water requirements for the closure period.