For the past two to three months, residents of Muthialpet are put to severe hardship due to frequent power outage in their locality.
The power outage has become very common in the entire Muthialpet area but it has become more frequent in places, such as Sholai Nagar, Sundaravinayagarpet, Perumalpetai, Muthaiya Mudaliar Street, Angalamman Nagar and Ragavailas Thottam, residents said.
According to Edison of Sholai Nagar, the outage has become very frequent and unpredictable. He claimed that not a day goes by without power disruption in Muthialpet. “ It is unjustifiable. The government has hiked the tariff more than three times in the last two years. People are now paying double the amount for power compared to last year. Now with frequent power cuts, people have to pay more to use generator and procure invertor to manage their routines during power cuts,“ said Balaji, a merchant on MG Road at Muthialpet.
Ezhilarasi, a resident of Sundaravinayagarpet, said there is no predictable pattern in the power outage. “On certain days, disruption will be there for a few minutes, several times. Sometimes, there will be no supply for a long time. Even during night hours, supply got disrupted for several hours during last month. Any disruption in electricity supply during morning hours, disturbs the entire family. The day’s work gets delayed due to disruptions in the morning,“ she said.
Edison said people expect quality service from the government when the tariff hike was imposed several times. According to an official with the Electricity Department, the disruption was due to complaints in the underground cable network. The government had carried out a major programme in the coastal areas to convert power distribution network underground post-tsunami.
“There have been several complaints after laying the cable lines underground. Now, there is frequent bursting of cables in the joints and junction boxes. We are attending to the work immediately after complaints but sometimes the repair gets delayed due to shortage of materials, “ said a foreman of the department.
He said most of the underground cables are in a bad condition and it needed a complete revamp to provide uninterrupted power supply in the area.
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