No power in homes, water everywhere in Gurugram

Vehicles wade through a waterlogged stretch during rain on the NH-48 service road near Narsinghpur village foot-over-bridge, in Gurugram on June 28.

Almost entire Gurugram suffered from blackouts lasting upto 18 hours in some areas on Friday after heavy rains resulted in widescale faults in overhead and underground feeders, transformers and at the two 220 kV substations which supplies power to majority of the urban area.

The large-scale outage that had started from 4am. Power supply in parts of Ardee City in Sector -52 that arose from underground cable fault and in Sector-23A (east zone) which was due to explosion in a transformer followed by fire could not be restored even till 9pm.

According to discom officials, faults developed in the two 220kV substations of Haryana Vidyut Prasaran Nigam Limited (HVPNL) at Badshahpur and Sector 72.

HVPNL officials said that the 220kV transmission line connecting the Sector-72 and Sector-20 substations had malfunctioned after the rain which took more than three hours for the power supply to restore.

Outages at the two substations resulted in more than ten 66kV substations not getting power supply.

After supply from the two substations was restored slowly between 7.30am to 8am, Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited officials had to deal with faults in the majority of the 11kV feeders to restore supply.

Chaitali Mandhotra, representative of Adree City RWA, said that they had been repeatedly requesting DHBVN officials to change the old cables.

“Surprisingly, ground employees of DHBVN told us that they don’t have the underground cables. They are not even performing routine maintenance,” she said.

Neeru Yadav, a resident of Sector-23A, said they had already faced long outages in the last two months. “We expected the outages to end now. Instead, the severity increased,” she said.

“Several areas faced up to six to eight hours long outages. Shivaji Nagar and Saraswati enclave residents were the worst affected as a transformer exploded there,” said Avinash Yadav, DHBVN executive engineer, city division, adding that almost all the feeders in his jurisdiction suffered from outages after the rain due to various types of faults.

Yadav said that conductors malfunctioned at several locations because the heavy rainfall occurred after extreme heat. “Trees also collapsed at a few locations damaging the power lines which also resulted in the outages,” he added.

Shalini Pannu, DHBVN executive engineer, sub-urban division, said that the outages at the two 220kV substations left most of the areas, where they supply power, with no electricity. “Later we received complaints of underground cable faults at Sector 23, Jharsa and Sector 38, whose repair work took at least three to four hours. In addition to the large-scale outages everywhere, the several local faults affected individual lanes and colonies,” she said.

Krishna Das, a resident of Sector 42, said electricity supply was restored in his neighbourhood after more than 12 hours at 4.30pm. “There was no water for almost the whole day as the pumps could not run,” he said.

Rohini Grewal, a DLF Phase 1 resident, said there was no power supply from 4am. “It was restored after almost eight hours. Thankfully, the rain kept the temperature low otherwise it would have been a horrible situation,”

Sudip Bhattacharyya, a resident of DLF Phase 3, said the power supply became erratic from 2am. “The long outage began between 4am and 4.30am and was restored at 2pm,” he said.

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