Hyderabad: Monsoon work causing outages

Hyderabad: The last minute monsoon preparedness by Discom officials is resulting in city areas having power cuts for four to five hours or more at a stretch.

Also, citizens complained that the announced timings for maintenance works are not being followed by officials. In most areas, including the IT corridor, old city as well as core areas in the city, the power cuts (load relief) are being attributed to monsoon preparedness works and tree felling. This despite the year-long maintenance related cuts.

Since the first spell of moderate rainfall bringing several line defaults about 10 days back, tree felling works have gained momentum in all the circles in the city. “Tree felling was speeded up after a spell of rainfall 10 days ago as many existing faults, which were not detected, come to the fore during showers. Also many areas across the city had pending maintenance works and tree branches have to be removed before the onset of monsoon. These works are usually kept for the last minute as trees grow very fast during this time of the year. So it doesn’t make sense to trim the branches a month before the monsoon,” said a superintending engineer from the IT corridor.

However, last minute maintenance works sometimes being taken up for an entire feeder stretch in one day overshoot the announced timings for power cuts too. “Although power cuts from 9 am to 12 noon were announced in our area two days back there were power cuts up to 4 pm and then again at night,” complained Vaishali P., a resident of Vikrampuri. colony.