Pakistan: after the gigantic blackout, the power is gradually returning
A gigantic blackout hit the whole of Pakistan on January 9, 2020. Karachi (our photo) was completely plunged into darkness.
Asif HASSAN AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
3 min
In Pakistan, this Sunday, January 10, electricity was gradually restored in the main cities of the country, plunged into darkness all night after a gigantic blackout, according to government officials.
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In Pakistan, the blackout on January 9 affected all the country's major cities including its capital Islamabad, its major
economic
hub
Karachi, and the second largest city, Lahore.
Power cuts are frequent in Pakistan, which has faced a chronic energy crisis for years and has a complex and dilapidated distribution system.
Many of its approximately 210 million inhabitants go without power for long hours every day, and the phenomenon worsens during the heat of summer.
Dysfunction
The outage is due to a malfunction that occurred at 11:41 p.m. local time on Saturday (6:41 p.m. UT) in the south of the country, Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan said on Twitter, saying he was basing himself on the first available evidence.
"
The malfunction affected the country's transmission system
(...)
which led to the shutdown of the power stations
", he explained, adding that the power was "
gradually restored throughout the country
".
Teams worked through the night to restore power, which had partially returned in the morning to Islamabad and Lahore.
The national company managing the distribution of electricity (NTDC) indicated that a committee would be formed to investigate the causes of the blackout.
It disrupted the electricity supply to all of the country's hospitals, which had to rely on their generators.
Netblocks, a nongovernmental organization that records internet outages, said connectivity in Pakistan fell as a result of the outage, standing at "
62% of regular level,
" according to its Twitter account.
In 2015, the worst blackout in the country
In 2015, 80% of Pakistani territory, including major cities, had already been plunged into darkness by a power cut caused, according to the government, by an attack by Baloch separatists on a power line in a remote district of the province of Balochistan (southwest).
The blackout, one of the worst in Pakistan's history, even affected one of the country's international airports.
(
with AFP
)
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