Millions of Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO)’s consumers in half of Lahore faced a massive power breakdown of more than 12 hours yesterday.
Citizens in Lahore were deprived of electricity from 7 am until 9 pm in many areas of the city. The breakdown created shortage of water for citizens in scorching heat.
LESCO had advertised the schedule in some papers regarding yesterday’s load shedding on account of maintenance of wires and other necessary repairing. The schedule, however, was announced on the day of the power outage rather than a day before which could have given them advanced notice to at least store water for the duration of the outage.
Last Sunday, a scheduled but massive power outage in Lahore’s Mayo Hospital area was observed on account of construction work of the Orange Line Metro Train project which created difficulties for citizens as well as patients of the hospital. The power outage claimed the life of a woman patient in the hospital.
The schedule announced yesterday was different for each area of the city. The advertised timings mentioned 7:30 am till 11 am, 7:30 till 1:30 pm, 8 am till 2 pm, 7:30 am till 4:30 pm and 9 am till 2:30 pm. However, LESCO failed to restore electricity as per the advertised schedule as people from different areas complained of no electricity even after the passage of more than 14 hours.
The residents of the city including in areas such as Wapda Town, Green Town, Raiwind Road, Johar Town, Mouza Sagian, Shahdra Town, Canal View, Iqbal Town, Garden Town and Multan Road etc complained of long hours of load shedding.
During the power outage, people who were for the most part unaware of the advertisement were curious about the reason for the power outage. They kept trying to contact LESCO to find out the reason for the power outage and when it would come back on, but kept getting different answers.
Contact numbers of the concerned XEN and SDO are mentioned on the electricity bills, so that consumers can contact them in case of emergency. A number of people told Pakistan Today that none of the concerned officials took their calls during the outage.
This scribe tried to contact the LESCO chief, the chief engineer as well as LESCO spokesperson to find out the reason behind the massive power outage, but the officials did not respond.
