KARACHI: Numerous areas in the city continue to experience prolonged and unannounced power cuts despite production resuming at the Bin Qasim power station’s faulty unit, Geo News reported Sunday night.
Residents of multiple localities in the metropolis were forced to have their sehri meal in the dark as electricity outages persisted, exacerbating the heatwave as temperatures touched 44°C Sunday afternoon.
A spokesperson for K-Electric (KE), Karachi’s sole power supplier, said the duration of load-shedding in some areas of the industrial hub has been reduced from three hours to just one hour.
Areas with line losses, however, will be facing over seven hours of load-shedding on average, the spokesperson added.
Last week, KE had said the fault at its Bin Qasim Power Station-II would be repaired by May 20, as a crucial spare part — weighing 41 tonnes — was to be flown in from the Netherlands.
The technical fault was cited as the reason behind the latest bout of the power crisis as Karachi faced a shortfall of 600-700 megawatts due to the Bin Qasim plant breakdown, leading to unannounced load-shedding in areas that were previously exempted from power outages.
