The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

Cyclone Sidr put the National Power Grid in complete disarray for over 18 hours beginning at 2:00am on Friday leaving the entire country without power.

The cyclone that ripped through the central part of Bangladesh's coastline, uprooted trees, electric and telephone poles and towers, tore apart electric lines and led all the power generation units to shutdown, a Power Development Board (PDB) source told The New Nation. PDB engineers tried to put the generation units back into operation from the morning. But their attempts continued to be disrupted by unforeseen damages caused to the National Power Grid as well as the power stations by the ferocious cyclone.

Power supply was restored to a few areas in Dhaka city in the morning only to go off a couple of hours later. Another attempt to restore emergency supply to some high priority areas, including the Bangabhaban and the Chief Adviser's Office, in the afternoon similarly failed.

Late in the afternoon, two 50-megawatt power stations at Kaptai were put back to operation and several others by 8:20pm raising the total supply to about 750 megawatt, PDB sources said. They said their first target was to feed Dhaka with electricity.

The capital Dhaka consumes merely a half of the total generation of little over 4,000 megawatt of electricity against the pick hour demand of about 5,000 megawatt.

Replying to a question, PDB officials said that the cause of the National Power Greed failure was not identified instantly.

According to the PDB sources, at least 10 of the total power stations remain closed always for various reasons, including machinery faults.

The source said the Independent Power Plants (IPP), including Meghnaghat, Haripur, Khulna Barge mounted and Ghorashal generate most of the total power. Until the IPP's are activated, smooth power supply across the country is not possible, the sources added.

Dhaka Electricity Supply Authority (DESA) sources said, although the entire country was under blackout due to the National Power Greed failure after the Sidr hit, 170 megawatt of power was supplied to Dhaka from 8:01 am to 12:00 noon for emergency purposes. But due to the severe disruption, power supply was not continued.

According to sources, most of the daily newspapers could not be published while printing of several others was hampered due to the power disruption and natural disaster.

Accordingly, most of the business establishments could not be opened while electronic media could not run their programmes smoothly.

Due to the disruption in telephone and internet connection, communication was affected severely causing untold sufferings to thousands of people in the country.

Witnesses said, trees in their thousands and electric poles were uprooted and twisted tearing apart the electric lines, telephone lines, internet connections and dish line connections in the city and elsewhere in the country.