SUKKUR: Thousands of families in the thickly populated areas of Old Sukkur have been without electricity and water for three days due to a massive power breakdown affecting several 11kV feeders of the SITE grid station.

Officials of the Sukkur Electric Supply Company (Sepco) said on Monday that the fault had occurred in the 20/26 MVA transformer at the grid station on Saturday and the technical staff had been trying to rectify it since then.

They said the staff was trying to shift much of the load to a 10/23MVA transformer and energise different feeders under a loadshedding regime to avoid an outage of long duration in any area.

However, power supply to many localities including Qureshi Road, Royal Road, Regent Colony, Bhakkar Chowk, Dubba Road, Bhoosa Lane, Jeay Shah Chowk, Outer Signal, etc could not be restored for a third consecutive day on Monday.They told the media that their areas experienced power and water cries off an on when power outage ran into many hours or when Sepco avoided considering water supply hours for various localities in its loadshedding regime.

Pumping stations managed by the North Sindh Urban Services Corporation (NSUSC) could not be operated due to the disruption in power supply.

As a result, Old Sukkur, Shalimar, Qureshi Road, Nusrat Colony No.5, Dubba Road and other areas faced a water crisis.

People, most of them women, were seen fetching water from hand-pumps, filter plants or taps far away from their localities for drinking and cooking purpose. Many households are either using subsoil water or buying tanker-supplied water for other purposes.

NSUSC Assistant Manager Mohammad Ali Mahisar said that the water supply schedule was badly affected by the massive power breakdown.

He hoped that Sepco would reduce the loadsheddding hours after removing the fault so that water supply to consumers could be normalised.

Grid station shut after manhandling of Sepco workers

KHAIRPUR: Power supply to most consumers of Nara taluka was suspended early Monday morning soon after some employees of the Sukkur Electric Supply Company (Sepco) posted at the grid station of the area were manhandled by unknown assailants.

Thousands of people suffered due to the outage that continued into the evening while the Sepco officials concerned did not respond to consumers’ complaints.

Sources in the power utility said that several Sepco workers were thrashed by assailants and one of them, Asad Shar, received grave injuries. They complained to their labour leaders, who decided to lodge an FIR against assailants at the Sorah police station. The workers shut down the grid station in protest against the attack, the sources added.

However, Sepco executive engineer at Khairpur Parvez Phulpoto while speaking to the media confirmed the incident but said that the grid station might have stopped functioning due to some major fault. He said a team of engineers and technicians would be arriving from Sukkur to inspect the grid station.

Meanwhile, a large number of power consumers including growers told the media that they had already been enduring excessive loadshedding but the total shutdown had not only brought more sufferings to them but also rendered their tube-wells and pumping machines, meant for watering the lands, non-functional.

This posed a serious threat to their livelihood, they added.

A leader of the Sepco labour union, Wali Mohammad Leghari, condemned the incident of workers’ manhandling and said there was growing unrest among employees of the power utility due to frequent incidents of attacks on them and their offices.

He urged the authorities concerned to ensure safety and security of employees of all power utilities in Sindh.

Published in Dawn, August 12th , 2014