CESC irons out power supply woes in city
18 April 2018 6:17 PM GMT
Kolkata: The devastating norwester on Tuesday evening disrupted power supply, especially in areas where the city is served by overhead wires. The impact could have been worse, as the city's underground cables remained largely unaffected.
There were, however, a number of cases where lamp posts belonging to other agencies like Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) were also affected. Amongst the affected areas were the Northern and Eastern parts of the city, including Patuli, Panchasayar, Survey Park, Lake Town, Bangur, Dum Dum, Kamarhati, Khardah, Sodepur, Howrah and Serampore.
As usual, the norwester affected electricity supply and there was a sharp surge in emergency telephone calls (1912) throughout the night. Fault report calls after the norwester rose to a record 36,000, against the average count of 4,000. CESC emergency repair services started restoration work immediately and more than 1,500 men worked throughout the night.
According to a CESC spokesman, "Working on a day-and-night basis, more than 70 percent of the faults could be restored through the night and it is expected that normalcy will be restored in most cases by Wednesday afternoon."
"Fortunately, there have been no major outages and all the Municipal drainage pumping stations worked smoothly at a trying time. We are keeping constant touch with the Municipalities and are ready to take every step to alleviate the suffering of citizens," he said.
Following the heavy rains, there was a noticeable fall in power demand on Wednesday, with the demand at 11.00 am being 1,428 MW, while the maximum demand met on Tuesday was 1,868 MW.
More than 6,000 CESC representatives are on special alert and the CESC Disaster Management Cell will keep watch till normalcy returns.
Next Story
