KARACHI, Dec 13: Power supply to the Haroon House, the Dawn Media Group’s head office, was restored on Thursday night, the third day after some fault crippled the Haroon House substation.
According to Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) General Manager, Operations, Region II, Ilyas Mansoor, power was lost due to multiple faults. “There were two to three cable faults, but it was a challenge reaching the problem points as a big portion of the cable is buried under the Rangers’ barriers on Dr Ziauddin Ahmed Road,” he explained.
“Also the burnt parts in the high tension panel’s circuit breaker and the current transformer are very old and obsolete, and replacing them is not easy,” he added.
The official was present at the Haroon House with his team and four KESC trucks.
The Haroon House ran on generators from 2.55pm on Tuesday till Thursday night. Arrangements were still made to publish Dawn, the leading English newspaper of Pakistan, on time.
Khawaja Kaleem Ahmed, Dawn’s publisher, suspected sinister motives on the power utility’s part. “Not getting any convincing response from the others in KESC, I personally called up CEO Tabish Gohar but he never took my call. Then I approached Osama Qureshi, Chief Staff Officer to the CEO, who requested me to leave a message. I must have left some 10 messages but received no reply. I also sent him a detailed SMS but to no avail,” he said.
Asked why the KESC wasn’t replacing their entire ancient system in the Haroon House substation instead of just looking for replacement of its obsolete parts, the KESC official said the organisation didn’t want to give up that easily on a reliable panel.
“Therefore we are working on isolating its faulty portions to fix the problem on a makeshift basis for the moment until we can fix it completely in two to three weeks after acquiring the parts,” he said. “This fault has only developed now. There were no problems before this for years,” he pointed out.
The GM Operations also mentioned that initially a much larger area had been affected due to the fault. “There was no power from Shaheen Complex to the pole mounted transformers around the Iranian Bridge. And we have slowly restored power to those places one by one until we started work at the main point of the problem in the Haroon House,” he explained.“This is a VVIP area for us, we receive revenue from here and are trying our best to repair the damage as soon as possible,” he said. But saying so, he also added: “These things happen. So please don’t depend on the KESC entirely and do keep your own backups handy in such times of crisis.”
