Digha grid goes kaput, west Patna ‘power’ less
2 min readPatna: Thousands of city residents spent a sleepless night and a distressing day during the last 20 hours or so as the western parts of Patna plunged into power crisis on Sunday afternoon after the Digha grid station went kaput following damages to the cable through which it receives power.
The worst hit were areas such as Pataliputra, North S K Puri, Boring Road, East Boring Canal Road, West Boring Canal Road, Nehru Nagar, Digha, Kurji, Rajiv Nagar, Buddha Colony, Anandpuri, Indrapuri, Shivpuri and Rajapul.
Technical experts of the South Bihar Power Distribution Company Limited could not give a specific reply as to when the power supply situation would turn normal. Even Patna Electricity Supply Undertaking GM (transmission) Arun Kumar Sinha was clueless till Monday afternoon though “we are on the job”.
“It will take a couple of days,” is all Bihar State Power Holding Company Limited (BSPHCL) spokesman H R Pandey could say when asked about the restoration of normal power supply.
One line of the double-circuit cable of Digha grid got damaged in December last due to the ongoing construction work on Bailey Road. “An imported kit was required for its repair. It arrived on Monday,” Pandey said and added, in the meantime, the other line of the double-circuit cable was damaged on Sunday evening due to some construction work near the canal on Bailey Road.
As a result of the damages to both the cables, SBPDCL has not been able to utilize since Sunday afternoon nearly 50MW of power which could have otherwise been supplied to these localities. “But we are supplying power from our other sources to the affected areas on rotational basis,” Pandey told TOI.
After at least one of the cables gets repaired with the help of the imported kit, sources said, normal power supply would be restored “temporarily”.
“I could not even dream of such prolonged power cuts in the state capital. We had not stored enough diesel for our apartment’s genset and, as such, had to spend a sleepless night on Sunday,” said Manoj Kumar, resident of a Boring Road apartment. Homemaker Rashmi of North S K Puri apprehended water crisis in days to come. “I have decided to store water for exigencies,” she said.
Ironically, commercial production at the unit-II of the National Thermal Power Corporation’s super thermal power plant at Barh has also been delayed due to multiple tube leakage. The commercial production of 660MW power at the unit-II was to begin on Saturday, and Bihar would have got half of it, as per a power purchase agreement, which would have been a major contribution to ease the perennial power crisis in the state.
Courtesy: TNN
