PUNE:
Wagholi resident Nitin Kumar Jain’s daughter Aanaya could not go to school on Friday morning. Wondering why? Well, she had a disturbed sleep because of an overnight power failure.
Not just Aanaya, many children of Wagholi bunked school on Friday after a sleepless night. Those not-so-young also had a torrid time because of the prolonged
power cut, lasting nearly 20 hours, amid the scorcher.
The power supply was shut down on Thursday afternoon after the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (
MSEDCL) undertook the replacement of one of the three transformers at Lonikand. The power utility took over 20 hours to completely restore the power supply in the Wagholi area.
Residents stated that the power was restored on Thursday night but only one phase was working. As a result, many appliances could not work.
Jain said, “Residents faced hardship in summer as fans and air-conditioners were off for almost 24 hours. The power went off around Thursday noon. Many societies and a section of goathan around Wagholi were affected because of it.”
He said, “MSEDCL restored the supply by midnight in some areas, but many societies were in the dark all through the night or the voltage was low.”
The residents claimed that they faced cascading effect of the power failure. The water pumps in housing societies did not work on Friday because of the power failure. Elevators in many societies failed to work after generators went off after a few hours. The residents also claimed that tankers did not supply drinking water to the housing societies because of the non-availability of power.
Srinivas B, another resident of the area, said he faced such a long power cut for the first time. “Power failure is common in our area, but for the first time there was no electricity for about 20 hours. After lights went off on Thursday, we thought that the supply will be restored by the evening. But the power was back only in the morning and at a low voltage. My kids did not go to schools. There was a chaos-like situation at home because of the power failure,” Srinivas said.
MSEDCL assistant engineer A S More, the official in charge of the Wagholi area, said the power was restored in the area in a phased manner. He said, “The work to change an old transformer was taken up at Lonikand. There can be disruptions in power supply during such a work. Since one transformer was closed, the remaining two were overloaded. This led to the power failure. There were some disruptions on Friday as well,” he said, adding that the transformer replacement was undertaken to minimize the power failure in the Wagholi area.
More said besides the replacement of the transformer, there were some problems in power cables at the local level.
