Odisha: Patients suffer as lights go out in Vimsar

SAMBALPUR: The patients of some wards of Veer Surendra Sai Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (Vimsar), Burla spent a sleepless Friday night following a sudden power failure owing to the breakdown of a transformer around 6pm that lasted till the next morning.
This caused great inconvenience to patients of the ENT ward, medicine ward-1 and ward-III apart from some other wings of the hospital, which is the biggest healthcare centre of western Odisha.
"Though the hospital has two high-power generators, some wards have not been connected to those. Patients of these wards had a tough time because of high humidity coupled with the mosquito menace," said a hospital staff.
Though hospital manager K Mahanta claimed that power supply was restored to these wards from other sources within five hours of the transformer going kaput, patients said only a few bulbs were flickering by then and the fans were not even working. They said power supply was fully restored after 10am on Saturday only. Ranjan Panda, the sub-divisional officer, Wesco, said, "The 500KV transformer got burnt owing to some internal problem. We immediately replaced it with a new one."