The city sweated and fumed in phases on Monday when power cuts with durations of one hour or more were imposed on many localities, some owing to shortage of power and some others due to overloaded lines and transformers.
While officials admitted to blackouts of an hour's duration imposed on all domestic connections of the Ranga Reddy District, ground level data suggests that even the core city was not spared. Even the GHMC headquarters near the State Secretariat, where power cuts are a lesser known phenomenon, plunged into darkness post noon when the sun was at his scorching best.
“Even the Mayor's chambers did not have power supply. I was told the problem was with CPDCL supply lines, and not due to internal glitches,” informed the Building Maintenance Engineer of GHMC Venkata Ramana.
Interestingly, local CPDCL officials did not have a clue about the blackout and maintained that everything was hunky dory with the GHMC premises as they had a dedicated supply line.
Neither the Chief General Manager of the company, nor the Superintendent Engineer concerned, was available for comment.
Areas surrounding the Chief Minister's Camp Office at Begumpet too, along with many divisions in Secunderabad, had to put up with outages of over an hour, as the 132 KV Gunrock substation which supplies to many 33 KV substations in the North Circle of Metro Zone was overloaded. Areas from Paradise to Padmaraonagar too were affected by the unannounced load reliefs.
Complaints of outages arrived also from areas such as Musheerabad, Habsiguda, Malkajgiri, Vanasthalipuram, Kothapet, Uppal and others, with consumers alleging power cuts during midnight too.
Nights also
“Every night we suffer power cuts from 11.30 p.m. to 12.20 a.m. On the nights they spare us in these hours, it would be worse, as they would cut off supply between 2.30 a.m. and 3.30 a.m.,” complained M. Sowmya, a resident of Habsiguda.
Discipline among the company officials has apparently slackened, as most of the divisional engineers in operation circles were ignorant about the outages in their respective areas, and the reasons behind them. Quite a few among them did not even know about the load reliefs imposed in their divisions.
However, according to information from CPDCL corporate office, areas falling into the Ranga Reddy Zone were imposed with emergency load reliefs each of an hour's duration. It is part of the exercise to address the gap between the unrestricted demand at 5000 Megawatts and availability at 4,300 MW. Loads remaining so, the same situation will continue for the next 15 days, with the possibility of including core city areas for load reliefs, they said.
