Old, faulty cables lead to long outages, residents fume

Noida: Residents from sectors 30, 31, 11, 12, 19, 20 and more, have been complaining of long to intermittent outages for the past few days.
“There were long outages of over 7-8 hours last week in our sector. My mother who is 80-years-old and a cancer patient had trouble sleeping in the night as even our inverter gave way after a point. Power cuts in our sector are frequent. Last year also, there were power cuts during peak summer months,” said Nina Singh, a resident of Sector 30.
Residents maintained that many complaints have been made to the power department over old rusting wires, need for new transformers, but there’s little respite.
When contacted Sanjay Agarwal, the superintending engineer at Pashchimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam Limited (PVVNL) told TOI that the power department is maintaining adequate supply to cater to peak 11,000 MW demand and the local faults on old wiring were the main cause of the power cuts.
“Cable faults in underground wires led to some outages in residential sectors. These are very old wires which get damaged. Joints made on them takes time as first we have to locate the fault and then repair it. Similar problems are faced in Sector 42 where we have tried to supply power from Sector 129 substation,” said Agarwal.