NEWS reports over power outage on last Friday night that left vast areas of central part of Bangladesh without electricity for several hours had in fact resulted from poor maintenance of outdated power distribution system. It left massive destruction of life and property when thunderstorms hit the region in absence of enough protective system to cause the outage. Experts said the outage occurred because the Power Distribution lines linked to National Grid had no inbuilt lightning arresters and earthening to protect transformers from going out to burst. In fact when the thunderstorms visited the region, the entire distribution system had collapsed plunging the region in the dark. Even most part of Dhaka city was struck by the blackouts for several hours in two consecutive days and engineers had to repair the system to put it back to work.
Power distribution was also snapped by uprooted trees and from their broken branches. However this is normal in such situation. The only thing is that the government must have highly efficient maintenance teams to put things back to order quickly. But question arises as to why the distribution system is so vulnerable to collapse where thunderstorms regularly visit our country in this season. Why the authorities have left the system without enough protective shields from being suddenly hit to cause a major power outage is the biggest question. Contrary to it, as we see the very repair and maintenance of the National Grid and its local power distribution system has been left more unattended and also unprotected to a section of corrupt power company employees and government officials who are regularly minting illegal money out of budgetary allocation to keep the system fit. Buying of poor quality transformers and their regular replacement and repairing are so far the biggest business to them as the report said nearly 38,870 transformers exploded and were either repaired or replaced in a single year in 2013-14 out of total 7,15,000. It had cost around Tk 300 crore to the nation.
It is almost clear that Power Distribution companies have no response mechanism to face disasters like thunderstorms, they have nothing as such in their scheme of things. Heavy rainfall and thunderstorms occur frequently in our country during monsoon and it is a matter of great concern that our power distribution system has no effective measure in strategically mapping out of contingency plans.
We must say while the government is giving more attention to power generation, which has also become a business proposition in the hand of corrupt elements in the high places, it must give more attention to updating the National Grid and its regional distribution system. It must have enough inbuilt equipment with the system to withstand catastrophe like thunderstorms and heavy rains.
