Lines trip,cut power for hours

Powercuts are likely to continue till Sunday morning,officials said.

Dense fog,combined with low temperatures and pollution,led to a massive power failure across large swathes of the region earlier in the morning,too. Powercuts lasting up to five hours were reported in Jammu and Kashmir,Himachal Pradesh,Haryana,Punjab and parts of Delhi.

Nearly 90 per cent areas in North Delhi,powered by NDPL,faced outages for two to three hours between 2.30 am and 9 am. Power failures were also reported from parts of West and South Delhi.

“When humidity is very high and temperature very low,accompanied by pollution,insulators on transmission lines become prone to fault and chances of these lines tripping and causing blackouts increase,” NRLDC General Manager V K Agarwal said. This,Agarwal added,is what happened on Saturday.

While only parts of Delhi were affected,the situation was especially bad in Punjab and Haryana,where power lines tripped and cut the states entirely off the Northern Grid for nearly five hours.

“We were anticipating the situation,since foggy weather usually leads to tripping of transmission lines,” Agarwal said. “By late afternoon,we were able to restore power supply to all states.”