Residents of Lahore were on Saturday left simmering in power outages of up to 16 hours as Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif demanded the prime minister immediately take notice of authorities’ ‘discrimination’ against the people of Lahore. Almost 80 percent of Lahore remained without electricity from 5pm to 11pm on Saturday.
Shahbaz said the extraordinary load shedding in Punjab, particularly Lahore, was not only increasing the problems for dengue patients, but also causing losses to the costly machinery provided for diagnosing and treating dengue patients at hospitals. “If this is a conspiracy, then stop it,” Shahbaz said. Sources told Pakistan Today that the National Control Centre (NCC) in Islamabad was shutting down grid stations across Lahore indefinitely and local grid stations had nothing to do with the outages. It was learnt that 27 of the 44 grid stations across Lahore had been closed down by Saturday evening, plunging most of the city into darkness. A drive around the city appeared an exposure to a wartime blackout, with a majority of the city’s buildings only getting intermittently illuminated by headlights of the vehicles passing by. The sources said the current spell of load shedding could continue until October 15, adding that the outages were not scheduled and it appeared that Lahore was being particularly targeted. A source in a grid station said that no part of the city was under any load shedding schedule currently. “We just received a call for switching electricity off for an indefinite duration,” an official said, adding that there was no certainty when electricity would be restored. “Often, a grid station is closed for at least three hours, even more,” he added. People were so frustrated with the outages that an angry mob reportedly attacked and damaged an electricity grid station in WAPDA Town. Sialkot district also experienced 22-hour-long load shedding, as GEPCO increased the duration of electricity outage from the existing 20 to 22. Traders kept shops shuttered and demonstrated at Allama Iqbal Chowk against the uncontrolled power load shedding.