Karachi hospitals, industrial units face hour-long power shortage

Excessive load shedding continues in Karachi despite the promises made with the federal government to ensure less power shortage after increased gas supply. Even the hospitals and industrial units were not spared by power outages carried out by the K-Electric.

The citizens continued to suffer from the load shedding despite promises made by K-Electric with Federal Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar and today’s visit of a NEPRA’s team to the K-Electric head office to ascertain facts regarding excessive load shedding.

The power utility sent messages of an eight-hour load shedding schedule to the industrial units in the business hub of the country, forcing them to halt production activity in night shifts during the time of the pandemic.

Other than the scheduled power outages, the industrial zones are also witnessing load shedding in the name of technical faults.

Other than industrial units, top hospitals and emergency centres are experiencing a complete power outage since Friday in the name of a fault in a local grid station.

The doctors and patients of the hospital, that is also treating COVID-19 patients besides other critical patients, has faced long spells of power outages.

According to sources, excessive load shedding in the city claimed that another unit of the Bin Qasim Power Station (BQPS-1) remained shut down on Monday due to a technical fault, creating a shortage of 130 megawatt in the city.

However, the current shortfall due to the shutdown of K-Electric power plants has increased load shedding period in exempted areas of the city to five hours while some of the areas are even witnessing upto 14-hours of power shortage.