Trees and poles uprooted, city battles outages for up to 6 hrs

NOIDA: Widespread outages, extending over six hours, were reported across the city as rain and thundershowers uprooted several trees and electric poles on Saturday morning. The nearly two-hour downpour led to flooding in parts of the city too.
In the 7x sectors, several condominiums reported prolonged outages till noon and had to rely on generators and inverters. Jitendra Kumar, a resident of Mahagun Moderne in Sector 78, said the condominium and some adjacent ones did not have power from 6am to noon. "We had to rely on diesel generators during the period," Kumar said.
Brajesh Sharma, a resident of nearby Antriksh Golf View 2, said there was a 4-5 hour outage in the society.
Residents of Sector 20, meanwhile, did not have power supply from 6-9 am. "The residential sector does not have a genset and people had to fall back on personal inverters. During the entire period, people could not use air conditioning or lifts. When we called the power department, they told us there were some technical issues. The power supply was resumed by 9 am," Rampal Bhati, president of Sector 20 RWA, said.
There were reports of tree and branch collapse from Sector 33, while a power pole fell in Sector 117.
PVVNL chief zonal engineer Rajeev Mohan said the department stopped supply only for 45 minutes, starting from 6am, as a precautionary measure, during the storm and rain. "Supply was resumed after 45 minutes but there were disruptions in supply at some sectors due to technical reasons. In Sector 62, a transformer of 63 MV malfunctioned and it took about 2-3 hours to fix it," he said.
Rain, meanwhile, brought down the temperature by over three degrees on Saturday. The city recorded a maximum temperature of 32.1 degrees Celsius and a minimum of 19.8 degrees against Friday's 35.3 degrees and 21.7 degrees, respectively.
While there was some waterlogging in parts of the city, it did not hinder the weekend traffic, police said.