Heavy Power Failure hits Odisha on Tuesday

Orissa Power Failure

A day after the northern grid failure, a similar problem in eastern grid caused a massive power failure in most parts of Odisha and neighbouring West Bengal and Jharkhand on 31st July. Services of 13 mail and express trains passing through Orissa were affected.

Hospitals in the city said the effect of the outage was minimal on operations because of inverters and generators. The entire state capital experienced power failure for around two hours. It was restored in certain pockets by 2.45 pm. Six districts of Balasore, Mayurbhanj, Jajpur, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapada and Keonjhar experienced complete blackout.

Power producer Gridco director (commercial) PK Pradhan said though grid collapse is not unprecedented, the scale of the current outage – affecting 19 states – was unprecedented. “Once the thermal power station at Kaniha is restored, the problem will be nearly over for Odisha,” he added. Both the units of the Odisha Power Generation Corporation (OPGC) and one unit of the Odisha Hydro Power Corporation (OHPC) were the saving grace during the crisis. Generation from these units continued uninterruptedly.