Karachiites who are already facing the scheduled loadshedding of five to six hours have also started braving additional, hours' long outages due to rising technical faults in the KESC system. Following a cable fault on Monday, the residents of Martin Quarters and surrounding areas are facing over 20 hours outages as despite timely complaint, power supply by KESC was not restored till filing of this report.
Though the supply, what the residents said, was restored for at least two hours on Tuesday afternoon, it was again shut off for reasons best known to KESC. The company, they said, terming it a technical fault had claimed that the restoration work was in progress and the power will be restored soon.
Clayton Quarters and some areas of Jamshed Quarters, according to sources, had also gone through the same agony on Sunday and the supply was restored after over 12 hours. Gulshan-e-Iqbal Block-7, PECHS Block-6, Mehmoodabad, A B Cina Line and parts of Keamari had also reportedly faced more than the scheduled outages on Monday for different faults.
A resident of PECHS Block-6 said the area had faced almost one-hour loadshedding after every one hour during the whole day and night on Monday. He said frequent outages were not only creating disturbance in the daily life but also causing sleeping disorders. He said though the complain centers of the KESC were registering complains but without any practical output on the part of the company.
The Korangi Industrial Area was also facing power breakdown for almost 10 hours for a fault in the grid station of the respective area, sources said. A large number of people in different areas also staged protest demonstrations against the unannounced outages.
Talking to Business Recorder, Latif Mughal, Secretary, People Workers Union of KESC alleged that the company was carrying out the hours-long loadshedding in the name of cable faults. He said cable faults have become an excuse for the management for the unabated power outages.
He said the management was doing a criminal negligence as it was deliberately running KESC's power plants at a lower capacity while relying more on the electricity supplied by Wapda. Under the current situation of electricity crisis, traders in the financial hub of the country were facing the yearly loss of around Rs 120 billion besides paralysing at least 60 percent industries of the city, he added.
Despite the change in weather and increasing demand of electricity, the company was yet to restore the full supply of power from Bin Qasim plant, which, according to sources, if run with maximum capacity, could reduce the hours' long outages. Sources alleged that the company's move was to save fuel as with the limited supply of gas from SSGC, the company needed to buy more furnace to run the dual fuelled plants of the privately run company.
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