The K-Electric's management on Wednesday issued a detailed statement explaining the power outages that occurred in Karachi and parts of Sindh and Balochistan the other day. According to KE's statement, the first breakdown in Karachi occurred at around 9pm due to tripping of the 220 KV transmission line that affected the generating units at KE's Bin Qasim Power Station and caused outages in many parts of the city.
The KE's management team and engineers worked all night to reboot, as per its standard operating processes and electricity was resumed in many pockets of the city at 1am. However, as soon as Bin Qasim's units were back online, tripping occurred in the supply system in Sindh at around 1am, which pulled down power supply not only in Karachi but also in parts of Balochistan. Power outages also occurred in Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Jamshoro, Hub, Uthal, Bela and Vinder.
Giving further details, it said that the sudden disruption of supply technically tripped the entire system to which the power utility/generation companies of Karachi and Sindh were connected. KE CEO Tayyab Tareen said that NTDC came back online early morning at around 5am and by that time KE had gone into "Island Mode" and had started the revival of its own generating units.
He further said that after the revival of NTDC's 500 KV line, different areas of Karachi were back online within a reasonable span of time. The KE's media spokesperson said "We apologise to our valued consumers for the issues caused by this breakdown and assure the public at large that K-Electric has made every effort to rapidly resume service to them - with zeal and commitment and especially in challenging and unforeseen circumstances like these."