LAHORE, May 20: People, including university students and women, continued demonstrations against prolonged power outages in the city on Friday. A Pepco official, however, said electricity supplies would improve on Saturday (today).

Scores of the Punjab University students blocked Canal Road to protest hours-long loadshedding.

With banners and placards inscribed with slogans against the Pepco for its failure to resolve the electricity crisis, protesters said their careers were at stake as loadshedding had affected their study schedules and preparation for examinations. Also, dozens of Samanabad residents put up a fierce agitation by burning old tyres on Multan Road.

Children and women were also among the agitators. They blocked the road for at least three hours.

There were also reports of power outages in some posh areas of the city for the last two days which show how helpless are even the rich to tackle the crisis.

PEPCO: Electricity supplies started improving on Friday afternoon, with furnace oil supplies resuming to some of the power plants and officials of Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) hope further improvement in next two to three days.

According to Pepco officials, two PSO ships carrying 120,000 tons of furnace oil arrived on Thursday night. Hubco has attained a full capacity generation and so did the AES (Lalpir).

Tankers are carrying the fuel to other plants and situation would further improve by Saturday morning when the entire supplies start hitting their destination. The PSO claims that two more ships would arrive in two to three days.

The supplies that already arrived would be sufficient for a week and meanwhile two more ships would arrive to ease the situation for further two weeks. “Their arrival does not mean the end of loadshedding, but it would certainly reduce un-announced loadshedding,” says an official of Pepco.

“By Saturday noon, there should be a reduction of at least 1,500MW in the current deficit that touched 5,789MW on Friday. The situation would further improve if the company gets more supplies and resume generation of 2,380MW, which was reduced because of current oil crunch, the official said.