Showers knock out power in 25 sectors

Noida: Over 25 sectors suffered power breakdowns ranging from 4 to 9 hours on Wednesday due to heavy showers. The sectors include 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 a broken cable 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 uprooted trees.A couple of substations and transformers also got damaged.
“We have no power in our sector since morning,” said Brigadier Ashok Hak (retd) 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 in 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 during the heavy showers on Wednesday, 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 33 kV line from Sector 66, Sector 12 suffered day-long outage on Wednesday as water collected near a transformer placed in the sector.
Meanwhile, other breakdowns included breaking of 11 kV line in Sector 32 due to falling of pole on it and a tree falling on 11 kV line in Sector 20 and also in Sector 37. The road cave-in on Harola Marg led to precautionary supply cut on 11 kV line in the area. Further, there was a two-hour outage in Sector 50 due to breakdown in the sector substation. The breakdown in Sector 42 substation led to no power in sectors 42, 43 and Agahpur village.
“During summer, the problems are attributed to overloading and now during monsoon again there are outages of more than five hours on account of faults in transformers, cables and earthing. PVVNL blames Noida Authority and the latter 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 900 MW, the long outages on Wednesday were due to extreme weather conditions. “All staff were on the ground on Wednesday 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 addressed on Thursday,” Singhal told TOI.