Over 25 sectors suffered power breakdown due to rains

NOIDA: Over 25 sectors suffered power breakdowns of 4 to 9 hours on Wednesday due to heavy showers. These include sectors 8, 11, 13, 27, 18, 61, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 93, 82 and more. On Thursday, there was no power in sectors 30, 28, 37 and 39 since morning, due to cable cut on the Bhangel line. In sectors 72, 76 and 77 there was no power for over two hours on Thursday morning.

While some sectors had road cave-ins damaging overhead cables, others had poles falling due to heavy showers and trees. Couple of substations and transformers also got damaged. However, the power situation is expected to normalise by Thursday evening as work is still underway say officials.

The situation continued in to Thursday where there was no power since morning in sector 30. “We have no power in our sector since morning,” said Brigadier (retd) Ashok Hak from sector 28. S K Jain from sector 37 and Garima Kapoor from Sector 77 echoed the same.

“Wednesday morning’s heavy showers led to more than nine hours of outages across many residential sectors. Most places in Noida and Greater Noida had wires breaking and falling, poles uprooting, trees falling on overhead high tension wires and breakdowns in substations. We had to stop supply for most part of early Wednesday morning to avoid further mishaps or damages,” said Mukul Singhal, superintending engineer, PVVNL.

While the supply remained disrupted in sector 6 due to fault in the cable line on Wednesday during the heavy showers, a tree that fell near labour chowk in sector 55 caused long outage from 8 am to 5 pm in Dhawalgiri society and sectors 11 and 12 the same day.

Even as supply in Sector 11 was restored from 33Kv line from sector 66, sector 12 suffered daylong outage on Wednesday as water collected near a transformer placed in the sector.

Meanwhile other breakdowns included breaking of 11Kv line in sector 32 due to falling of pole on it and a tree falling on 11Kv line in Sector 20 and also in Sector 37. The road cave-in on Harola marg, led to precautionary supply cut on 11Kv line in the area. Further there was two hour outage in sector 50 due to breakdown in the sector substation. The breakdown in sector 42 substation led to no power in sector 42, 43 and Agahpur village.

“During summer the problems are attributed to overloading and now during monsoons again there are outages of more than 5 hours on account of faults in transformers, cables, earthing (every time there is a new excuse). PVVNL blames Noida Authority and NA blames PVVNL. Nobody appears to be accountable for this mess,” said Sanjay Govil a resident.

According to Singhal while the demand has come down to 900MW, the long outages on Wednesday were due to extreme weather conditions. “All staff were on the ground yesterday to correct faults and breakdowns in the affected areas. Some problems could not be rectified due to knee deep water in the areas which were address on Thursday. We will normalise supply by the end of the day today,” Singhal told TOI.