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WEEKLY
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| Outages add misery to heat-stricken Lahorites |
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
By Umer Bhatti
LAHORE
LAHORITES on Tuesday saw a troublesome day as the temperature of the provincial metropolitan soared to 45.2 degrees Celsius, maximum in the province, with the worst loadshedding of the summer for more than 12 hours in urban and 15 hours in rural areas.
According to reports, some areas of the city suffered even more than 14 hours of loadshedding. The areas included Band Road, Garhi Shahu, Multan Road, and some blocks of Allama Iqbal Town which are near Multan Road.
When contacted, the hapless citizens blasted Wapda and government high-ups. They said no one in the country cared for problems and needs of the common man and all high-ranking officials were busy minting more and more money.
A 25-year-old youth from Multan Road told The News, “Since my birth, this country has been facing the problem of loadshedding and it will perhaps last as long as I live.” He said there was no leader in the country who paid heed to the problems of the country sincerely. He said the power crisis was annoying and it should have been solved by giving it first priority. He criticised the present government, Wapda, Pepco and especially the Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco). He said he was an electrical engineer and he could understand the fact that if any maintenance or development work would have been undertaken with utmost technical expertise in the Lesco, the problem could have been solved till now, but unfortunately nothing was being done by the Lesco except making promises and misleading the people.
A spokesman of Pepco also told The News that the problem of loadshedding in Lahore was only due to constraints within the Lesco and it was not at all a generation problem.
As it was a hot day in Lahore on Tuesday, the power shortfall between demand and supply was also the highest in the summer which was 1,000mw.
A woman from Iqbal Town said that almost every problem in the country was related to the energy crisis. She said that due to the outages the country was going down economically, socially and politically too.
She said people were becoming psycho-patients due to outages. She said already poor health conditions in the country had deteriorated on account of loadshedding. She said the worst affected by loadshedding were children and working class. Children cannot study properly nor they can sleep well, so they cannot be productive in any field, she said. The same is the case with the working class of society, she added.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
