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New Delhi: Seven states in north India woke up to a
powerless Monday with supply cut at 2.32 a.m. due to a major
breakdown in the grid that was not fully corrected till well into
the afternoon, disrupting not just rail, metro and road traffic
but also hospitals.
The preliminary reason for the power failure - one of the worst in
a decade - was attributed to an outage in the northern grid, which
is an interconnected transmission network that delivers
electricity from various power generating stations to distribution
utilities.
Apart from the national capital Delhi, supplies were sharply
affected in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh,
Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir, said V.V. Sharma, general manager
of Power System Operation Corp Ltd.
The company, a subsidiary of the state-run Power Grid Corp of
India, which manages the grid, sought to restore power by supplies
from the eastern and the western regions, even as power to the
railways and Delhi Metro was restored by 9 a.m.
According to the company, parts of Badarpur in south Delhi, Narora
and Simbhauli in Uttar Pradesh and Bhinma in Rajasthan were not
hit by the tripping.
By afternoon, a semblance of normalcy was restored with most areas
in north India getting electricity supply.
Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters in New Delhi
earlier that efforts were on to restore power supply on "a war
footing".
The minister denied that essential services were hit.
A three-member panel has been set up to look at the cause for the
power failure.
With water treatment plants hit by the power failure, it was a
double whammy for millions who had to contend with no power and no
water as well.
The impact was felt in the critical healthcare sector.
All government hospitals, in the national capital, for instance,
were put on emergency services and generator back-up.
According to railway officials, about 1.5 lakh passengers in
around 300 trains suffered delays as the grid failure cripple
operations across eights divisions of the Northern Railway.
Besides, about 200 goods trains had to be cancelled, resulting in
an estimated loss of over Rs.100 crore, because passenger trains
were given priority.
Many important trains like the Lucknow-Delhi Mail and overnight
trains plying between New Delhi, Lucknow, Allahabad and Varanasi
and Moradabad were stranded en-route, while some were brought to
the nearest stations by diesel engines, a railway official said.
Delhi Metro services were restored fully only after two hours --
at around 8.45 a.m.
A Delhi Metro official said they got hydel power from Bhutan on
priority basis, and added that Delhi Metro was among the emergency
services, including the prime minister's residence and the All
India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), that were provided
power.
Power failure crippled most traffic signals in Delhi, causing
massive traffic jams during office hours.
Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport functioned normally
with the help of generators.
In Uttar Pradesh, the power situation was almost normal in Lucknow
and the eastern parts of the state by afternoon.
Hydro-power generation in Himachal Pradesh resumed Monday morning
more than seven hours after the Northern Grid collapsed and
stopped electricity production.
The state-run Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Board has 21
hydropower projects across the state with a combined optimum
generation capacity of 8.5 million energy units a day.
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