When monsoon has reached the State and spells of rain with thunderstorms and cyclonic winds are ready to play with transmission lines all eyes are on the preparedness of the Energy Department or in fact the company (Jharkhand Urja Vitaran Nigam limited) made for power distribution.
Sadly the company lacks in basic equipments to deal with snapped electricity wires and powered polls.
“We have nothing special preparation to deal with monsoon. Every year wires get snapped due to falling of trees in various parts of Ranchi and other parts of the State. This time as well we have to depend upon manual arrangements,” said Ramnikat Sinha, public relations officer.
The rainy season often brings tough time for the power maintenance staffs.
last year itself a high tension line had fallen over people killing one.
Several areas of the city had to face hours of blackouts due to tree fallings, the phenomena quite common during monsoon.
A senior official of Jharkhand Urja Vitaran Nigam limited admits about lacking support equipments.
“Unlike metros we do not have vehicle mounted tree cutters, trawlers, cranes etc. This makes us handicapped in dealing with such a scenario. We are left with whatever manual staff we have,”
he said.
The situation is even worse in the far flung areas of latehar, Chatra, Palamau, Garhwa and others. “We often face this situation in rains. Just hours of rains and some storms break down the power supply. Besides missing equipments to deal with precarious situation we also have the old and outdates parts such as insulators, circuit breakers and transformers,” said an engineer posted at Daltonganj.
Bizarre is to know that a snake had reportedly caused 12-hour-long power cut in Daltonganj early this month when the reptile took shelter on a transmission line connecting the area from Hatia grid.
After a few days, similar situation returned when the town witnessed rainfall with high speed wind. Several electricity poles and transformers had to face the heat during the brief spell causing prolonged power cuts.
The company is not even planning to purchase such equipments in near future. “We are planning to have underground cabling of electricity lines under R-APDRP project. Once the project is on ground such problems would not arise,” said SN Verma, CMD of Jharkhand Urja Vikas Nigam limited, the holding company.