Hours-long power cuts,rising mercury pile misery on citizens

Karachi
Frequent and prolonged electricity outages are testing the patience of consumers in many parts of the city, with temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius.
Irate residents have complained of unannounced power cuts, saying they are spending their days and nights with great difficulty.
Talking to The News on Friday by phone, Iqbal Effendi, a consumer who lives near the Baitul Mukarram mosque in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, said the lights went out late at the night and were not restored till the Fajr prayers.
“When a complaint is lodged with K-Electric’s staffers, the reply is typical that there is a cable fault or maintenance work is under way,” he said.
He wondered why his bill was still inflated when the supply was down for hours every day. He further complained that several electrical appliances at his home had gone out of order because frequent voltage fluctuations.
Nargeen Zia, a resident of Azizabad, said there was a 12-hour outage in her locality from Thursday midnight till noon on Friday.
“Nobody listens to our complaints. In this sizzling summer heat, my family is suffering a lot and prolonged power cuts are exacerbating the situation,” she said.
She criticised the KE management and the government, and said the top officials of the power utility should step down if they could not do their job properly.
A dweller of Clifton, Jamal Nasir, said that “we are totally helpless and pray that KE would improve its performance”.
A number of people in Orangi and Baldia towns also criticised the KE for resorting to hours-long outages.
Rehman Baba, the prayer leader at a mosque, said people were forced to offer prayers in dark because electricity was often out. He lamented that people were offering prayers in the sizzling heat with no fans running at the mosque.
Nadeem Jafri, a resident of North Karachi, flayed the K- Electric for suspending the electricity supply to his neighbourhood for up to 13 hours a day.
The owner of a hotel in Patel Para, Gul Khan Zai, said he had fired several of his cooks and waiters as his business was suffering big losses due to power cuts.
He said that until recently, his hotel stayed open well past midnight, but “now we close it at 11pm”.
Residents also complained that technical faults were not fixed timely, and, as a result, they faced difficulty in getting ready for work because they did not have enough water to bathe or they could not iron their clothes.

KE denies ‘long’ cuts
A KE spokesman admitted that the city was facing seven and a half hours’ long power outages, but he denied electricity was out for 12 hours a day.
He mentioned a “segmented loadshedding” system whereby the city was divided into various areas such as low-loss areas, medium-loss areas and high-loss areas.
The KE spokesman said loadshedding was done in high-loss areas where people stole electricity through illegal connections. He said electricity theft caused cables to snap and pole-mounted transformers to trip. Such problems led to electricity suspensions lasting up to 12 hours, but they should not be described as loadshedding, he added.