Power outages leave residents fuming

Many areas in city go without power for long hours as power employees strike. Though officials claimed off the record that it was a uniform one-and-a-half hour load relief across the city, for quite a few localities, the duration was well over three hours.

Residents of many areas in the city sweated and fretted under the impact of rampant and irrational outages across the city and surrounding areas, owing to the strike of work by power sector employees.

Units shut down

Officials attributed the power cuts to the shutdown of generation units in various plants of the State. However, load reliefs were hardly uniform across the localities, with some areas experiencing tedious hours of blackouts, and some others totally spared of them.

For example, many areas in Sainikpuri were put through five hours of shutdown in the day, while those around Tarnaka and Serilingampally did not have any till late in the evening. Customers were at loss to decipher any schedule or pattern in the enforcement of load reliefs.

“We had a blackout between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. and again power went off at about 7 p.m. In between, there were many interruptions of five to ten minutes’ duration. The outages were haphazard and irrational,” fumed Y.Sudhakar Reddy, a resident of Saroornagar.

Though officials claimed off the record that it was a uniform one-and-a-half hour load relief across the city, for quite a few localities, the duration was well over three hours. Many localities had power cuts during night too. With traffic signals not working, chaos prevailed on the roads.

“Generation is merely about 6,800 MW, with many units kept just on breathing. For 4,200 MW of thermal power, only 700 MW is being produced now. There is 1,000 to 1,200 MW shortfall for CPDCL, and hence power cuts became necessary,” informed an official under anonymity.

No response

There was no response from either officials or emergency control room, as most staff from the Central Power Distribution Company (CPDCL) chose not to take calls during the strike.

“Power was gone at 1 a.m. on Monday due to strong winds, but calls to 1912 (CPDCL’s Emergency Control Room) were not picked up till about 6 a.m. Even then, nobody was sent, and we had to call the lineman unofficially to get the fuse replaced,” informed Rama Murthy, a resident of Moosapet. Same complaints from residents of Amberpet, Banjara Hills, Nadeem colony and so on.

Ambika from Sikh Village too had similar experience.

“Power goes off in one phase or the other for the last 15 days. Since yesterday, it has gotten worse. There was no response from either DE or ADE of our area, and when we went to the substation, we got to know that they were on strike. We had to bring a private electrician and get some repairs done for time being.”