President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday directed Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) Chairman to submit a comprehensive report on the continued power outage from Mangla, identifying the factors responsible for this delay. The President directed the authorities that the report should identify factors responsible for this fault, steps taken to rectify it and plan chalked out to ensure that such breakdowns did not recur, spokesman to the President former Senator Farhatullah Babar said.
He said the President had taken a serious note of the persistent power shortage from the Mangla powerhouse and its non-restoration thus far. He said the directive also called for indication of a time frame within which the system would be fully restored, he said. The national grid suffered a massive shortfall of another over 1000 MW as Mangla powerhouse developed serious technical faults, plunging the power generation to zero.
The fault occurred despite the fact that there was enough water for discharge and storage to generate the usual 1100 MW. The Mangla outage resulted in aggravating the power crisis as the shortfall in the national grid soared to 3650 MW. The President asked that his office be kept informed about the power situation and the steps being taken to improve it on a regular basis, the spokesman said.