Mumbai Power Failure: Major Outage Brings City to Standstill For Hours | Here’s What Happened

New Delhi: Mumbai woke up on Monday morning to witness a massive power cut almost all across the city due to “TATAs incoming electric supply failure”. The outage disrupted normal lives and even affected services on the Mumbai local and suburban trains on the Western and Central Railway line. Traffic signals and CCTV at road junctions also stopped working.

However, the Mumbai International Airport and the stock exchange (BSE) were functional.

All the power companies — MahaVitaran, Adani, Tata and BEST confirmed the development but declined to comment on the reasons. Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray ordered a probe into the matter.

Here’s the full timeline of events:

1. Tata Power suffered grid failure and the electricity supply went off in several parts of the city at around 10 AM.

2. The incident blows up on social media platforms within the next few minutes, forcing the authorities to take immediate action.

3. Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) confirmed the glitch due to “TATA’s incoming electric supply failure” and asked hospitals and civic bodies to be prepared with diesel supply for at least eight hours of power failure.

4. Maharashtra Energy Minister Nitin Raut said power will be restored in 45 minutes to an hour.

5. Central Railway train services were restored at around 10:55 AM, while Western Railway was restored till 12:20 PM.

6. Tata Power releases statement: “At 10.10 AM there was simultaneous substation tripping in MSETCL’s Kalwa, Kharghar causing a huge dip in frequency in Mumbai transmission system which led to tripping of power supply. Restoration work in progress to bring supply from the 3 Hydro units & Trombay units.”

7. CM Uddhav Thackeray ordered a probe into the grid failure and gives direction to the BMC for its restoration as soon as possible.

8. Western and Central Railway services were fully restored by 1 PM. Power at hospitals and other emergency services were also restored.

9. Power supply was restored in most parts of the city by 3 PM. “Out of 2000 MW which went off, about 1900 MW has been restored, the remaining will be restored soon,” said Union Power Minister RK Singh.

10. A team from the Central Authority has been sent to Mumbai to sit down with the state transmission authority and find out how the problem started. The situation is still being monitored by the BMC as well as the Maharashtra government.