Islamabad: After around eleven hours of blackouts, the power is gradually being restored to major cities across Pakistan.
Residents breathed a sigh of relief when their power was restored. "Today I realised our whole lives are dependent on electricity. We did not have water to drink; even I could not go to the toilet because the pumps are powered by electricity," said Ahmad Khan, a resident of Islamabad's posh sector F-10.
In some cities, electricity was partially restored while many parts of the country continued to plunge into darkness. "We don't have electricity yet, we have been told it will be restored by Tuesday morning," said Sohail Ahmad, a resident of Bahawalpur.
Minister for Energy Khurram Dastgir blamed frequency variation in the national grid after the country went into a blackout Monday morning. Pakistan’s major cities plunged into darkness, including the capital Islamabad, Karachi, the second-largest city, Lahore, and other metropolitan areas. The minister promised that electricity across the country would be fully restored by 10 p.m.
Due to the blackout, shops and markets in the country closed early, while residents struggled to survive the severe cold weather. Because of a lack of natural gas supply, most people in cities rely on electric heaters to beat the chilling winters.
The outage is the second major grid failure in three months, and in addition to the long hours of outages, people suffer on a daily basis.
The electricity distribution system in Pakistan, which houses more than 210 million people, is complex and delicate. Any problem in the system could lead to cascading breakdowns countrywide.
Pakistan is going through a recession-like situation and has a serious liquidity crunch. The government shut down the fossil fuel-fired power plants, but the measure backfired.
"As an economic measure, we temporarily shut down power generation systems on Sunday night to save on fuel, but when we tried to turn the systems on Monday morning, it triggered a fluctuation in voltage, resulting in the shutdown of plants," the minister said.
The outage spread panic and raised doubts about the government's ability to deal with the escalating economic crisis.
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