By IANS
New Delhi : A major power outage in the northern parts of India cut electricity supplies to several states, including the national capital, and disrupted train services, before being completely restored by around 10:30 a.m. The failure was attributed to a technical snag because of dense fog.
“The problem began at 2 a.m. with intermittent power failure being reported from the northern grid,” Rajeev Saxena, chief public relations officer of Northern Railways, said.
“The situation worsened by 6.30 a.m. Most of the Delhi bound Rajdhani trains were delayed by several hours. Although the Shatabdi trains left Delhi on time, many were stuck en route,” Saxena told IANS.
He said 25 trains had been delayed in a big way, including Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains between the capital and various cities. He said power supply was fully restored by 9 a.m.
A spokesman for the Northern Regional Load Dispatch Centre (NRLDC) of the Power Grid Corp said 50 lines of 400 kv in Delhi, western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana tripped at around 2 a.m. The system was restored at about 9 a.m., he added.
The engineers were suspecting the snag was due to heavy fog that had got the high-tension wires wet.
As many as 400 trains, including local shuttles, depart from and arrive at the capital’s major stations, ferrying around 800,000 passengers every day. Saxena said the power outage did not affect the local service.
Rishi Raj, spokesman of the Delhi Transco, said: “East and west parts of Delhi faced blackouts when the northern power grid problem began. North and south Delhi also faced intermittent electricity outages but were not badly affected.
“Power was initially restored at 9 a.m. but some lines tripped again and the situation was completely normalised by 10 a.m.,” said Raj, whose company is among the power distributors in the capital.
Sutanshu Agarwal, deputy general manager of power transmission in Ghaziabad, said Uttar Pradesh towns falling in the national capital region – Noida, Greater Noida and Ghaziabad – were badly affected by the power outage.
He also felt the electricity lines might have tripped due to dense fog.
National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) officials said they had been forced to halt operations for a while at two plants in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.
“Due to the grid problem, the NTPC’s plants at Dadri (Uttar Pradesh) and Faridabad (Haryana) stopped working for a short while,” NTPC spokesman T.S. Rajput told IANS.