the goan I network
MAPUSA
Power interruptions and fluctuations have become the order of the day in Mapusa, causing much heartburn among the public.
In the last two days, several parts of Mapusa have witnessed power cuts sometimes extending for over an hour.
“There are no showers and no lightning. There’s no wind blowing either, yet we have power failure for reasons best known to the department,” said Mahesh Rane of Khorlim-Mapusa.
On Saturday, power tripped at least six times at short intervals within a span of two hours between 11 am to 1 pm at noon in the city.
“In spite of no rains or bad weather, on Friday midnight we had a power cut for almost an hour. We can understand if it’s pouring or blowing and we can blame the weather for the failure, but here we have fine weather and still the power goes off,” said Laura D’Sa of Angod, Mapusa.
Whenever questioned, department officials have ready-made answers of either “feeder is faulty” or “jumper has snapped”.
Sources informed that Mapusa has been saddled with ageing power infrastructure which needs urgent replacement.
Mapusa electricity Executive Engineer Pradip Narvekar informed that the constant tripping of power on Saturday was due to some repair work undertaken on the 33KV supply.
“The department had undertaken some work to change over 33KV supply
at Mapusa sub-station. This has been done to avoid power failures in future,” Narvekar said.
Also, due to the recent squall that struck Mapusa and some parts of Bardez, the department had suffered losses worth several lakhs on account of broken poles and transformers.
“Several feeders were interlinked after the squall so that power could be restored to maximum number of people in the shortest time. We need to sort that out and once that happens things will normalize,” a source in the department said.
