Lucknow saw 10,700 power disruptions in 3 weeks

LUCKNOW: A perfectly planned dinner party organised by Kamini to celebrate her parents’ 29th wedding anniversary on Friday night was ruined, thanks to a long and punishing power cut. Supply in her locality, Aashiana sector H, returned hours later at 6.30am on Saturday. It was again disrupted and reinstated more than three hours later.
Similarly, areas like Kashmiri Mohalla, Eldeco-2, Gwari, sector-4 Extension of Gomtinagar, Kamta, Kasmandi, Ganjaria, Nadarganj and scores of other areas reported long-hour power cuts due to various reasons over the past three weeks.
Exclusive data accessed by TOI revealed that Lucknow Electricity Supply Administration (Lesa) registered 10,727 power disruption cases between May 1 and May 21. While 6,183 cases of outage were in Lesa Cis jurisdiction, 4,544 cases were in trans-Gomti area. Of these, 378 cases of power outages lasted more than one hour, including 49 cases where power supply was disrupted for more than five hours.
According to Lesa engineers, just 3.5% of the total power outages were of more than one hour, the rest were as short as 60 seconds to half an hour.
“The reason behind the large numbers of cuts was tripping caused by tangled kites on overhead power cables, overloading of feeder, earth fault, sudden load, overload of transformers (due to power theft), shut down for maintenance and even burning of power cables,” said a senior officer of Lesa.
Lesa Cis chief executive engineer Vipin Jain said, “Short power cuts is a regular phenomenon which is often a preventive measure to avoid any kind of damage to power assets, but the bigger headache for us is long power outages caused by damaging of cables or transformers, caused by power thefts or by unauthorized activities such as digging by telecom companies.”
“Further, fires caused by webs of optic cables also lead to long outages. Now, Lesa is laying underground cables and in coming years will introduce a control system. Currently, our lineman patrol on foot to inspect cables,” he added.
According to Lesa, another reason behind long-hour power cuts is shortage of field staff.
General secretary of Lesa engineers’ association Ashish Kumar said, “There are just 18 to 24 men at any sub-station to cover a stretch of 10km-long power cables, which should ideally be covered by 34 men. When there is any complaint of power outage, the team is required to patrol the area on foot and locate the exact spot. So, it does take time to resume supply.”