Pakistan’s Nationwide power break put the country into darkness
On Monday, Pakistanis had the most prolonged nationwide power outage, which disturbed their everyday routines.
Millions of Pakistanis were left without electricity on Monday due to a significant failure in the country’s national grid. The country’s shattered and poorly maintained electricity grid was again in the spotlight because this was the most prolonged outage in recent years.
Local authorities reported that the outage started in southern Sindh Province following an unusual voltage fluctuation. Khurram Dastgir Khan, the energy minister, stated at a news conference that this caused a cascade failure at power plants across the nation.
As authorities rushed to restore the electricity on a chilly winter morning, the failure spread to numerous small and big cities, including Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and Quetta.
The power brake disrupted the daily life of the people. Services for mobile phones and the internet intermittently went down nationwide. Some hospitals, government buildings, educational institutions, and airports managed to keep running through emergency generators.
“There was complete chaos in the hospital because of the power outage,” said Akram Shah, a 45-year-old textile worker who was accompanying his sick mother at the state-run Abbasi Shaheed Hospital in Karachi. “Doctors asked most of the patients, who were at hospitals for surgeries, and tests, to come again tomorrow.”
The nationwide power failure has happened for the second time in less than three months. It happened amid the financial crisis in Pakistan.
The official said, “Pakistan has recorded an economic loss of around Rs100 billion (USD 1.2 billion) amid total blackout on Monday,” Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) former chairman Muhammad Idrees estimated while talking to The Express Tribune.
On the other hand, Pakistan Prime Minster Sharif had previously ordered all federal departments to cut power consumption by 30 per cent.
The decision to cut down on energy consumption came as Pakistan announced that its foreign exchange reserves had dropped to a low level, at $11.7 billion, half of what it had at the beginning of 2020, the Central Bank reported.
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