Several residential localities in Ranchi, especially Morhabadi, Bariatu and Argora, plunged into darkness on the intervening night of Friday and Saturday with heavy rains coupled with high wind speed uprooting trees, causing faults in transformers and breaking electricity wires. The snags in power supply were not resolved in some localities of the City capital by the time this report was filed on Saturday.
Residents of Harihar Singh Road, an important stretch that connects Morhabadi to Bariatu, had to deal with power cut for several hours on Saturday morning. Power supply remained suspended from early morning till afternoon, and was later restored, but the residents of the locality still had to deal with intermittent power cuts throughout the day.
The situation was worse for the residents of apartments near the Ranchi Science Centre at Chiraundi. Residents of Sukriti Apartment in the area had to suffer without electricity on the intervening night of Friday and Saturday. Inverters also ran out of power by Saturday afternoon in many households and the residents had no option but to wait for the electricity department to fix the faults.
“There has been no supply of electricity since Friday evening. Most of us are working from home these days, and the power cut is now affecting our work as most of our electronic devices, including laptops, have run out of juice,” said Satya Kumar, a resident of an apartment in Chiraundi.
Officials from the Jharkhand Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited (JBVNL) blamed the power cuts on “local faults”, claiming that the electricity department had surplus power for supply in Ranchi and there was no outage.
“Continuous rains coupled with high wind speed have uprooted several trees in the city. When trees get uprooted, they often break electricity wires, causing disruption in supply. Most of the areas that suffered from power cuts had faults at a local level,” said the public relations officer of JBVNL, MP Yadav. “We still have surplus power for supply, so lack of power is not the reason for the power cuts,” he added.
As heavy rains continued to lash different parts of Jharkhand on Saturday, the electricity department failed to fix the faults in the supply system as engineers and other technical staff couldn’t reach the spots and fix the problems, JBVNL officials said. Some engineers, who tried to fix local glitches in the supply system, had to return without fixing the issues as the weather did not permit them to do their job. Not only did the continuous downpour affect electricity supply, but it also caused water-logging in many localities. Cars and bikes parked at a private parking lot of an apartment near Eklavya Tower on the Argora to Kathal More road submerged in water after hours of rain. Pictures of the water-logged parking space went viral on social media with some residents claiming that the city has not seen such disastrous effects of rains in several decades while many claiming that the water-logging was a result of poor architecture.