1 So yesterday after a long time Mumbai city & suburbs felt a power outage, which affected more than 6.5 million power consumers. In this time, during Covid pandemic, it was very hard time for many hospitals, specially for the patients who were being treated in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Many exams which were being conducted were hit. Trains came to halt, traffic signals were not working, hospitals procedures were cancelled. Water supply and internet connectivity got affected, and courts were forced to call of the hearings. Many people got trapped in lifts and were eventually rescued by firemen. Power supply slowly started resuming after 2 hours, bur certain suburbs could get power only by the night time. We, Mumbaikars are not used to power outage compared to many people who are staying outside of Mumbai, because of islanding facility Mumbai is enjoying, and from decades Mumbaikars are paying extra tariff for the same. This was done by govt to keep Mumbai going, because it is considered as commercial capital of the country, but yesterday islanding also failed.
The main problem started with Kalwa substation, which has four lines 400 Kilo Volts supply power to Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Actually the problem started on Saturday afternoon, when conductor of Kalwa-Talegaon power grid line broke down in remote area. During repair on Monday early morning, the Kalwa Padgha circuit no. 1 shut down because of over voltage. At around 10 am Kalwa Padgha circuit no. 2 also shut down because of a technical fault. Mumbai was then islanded (isolated from state’s grid). But then the Tata Power’s 570 MW unit shut down due to overload while Adani’s 250 MW Dhanu hydro unit continued to supply vital installations like the Airport and few big hospitals. And cascading affect of all these, was the power outage in Mumbai. The local trains on both Central & Western Railway could resume their service only by 12.30 pm. Most of the school and colleges had to cancel their online classes. Even people working from home suffered because of this power failure as they were not able to recharge their laptops and telephones. People working on home PCs were totally crippled as without power their computer could not function.
In my opinion, Mumbai ought to be better equipped with a contingency plan to deal with mega power outage. The islanding system, which held the city in good shape during grid failure, needs to be upgraded as the system operating is decades old. For commercial capital to function, it is imperative that the disaster management planning should be given top most importance . It is very critical for all vital installations , establishments and essential services in Mumbai Metropolitan region to remain operational in the event of any power outage.
2 India on Monday, recorded its lowest Covid cases in 63 days and the lowest casualties in 77 days as the dip from peak levels continued. Yesterday’s 53,082 cases are the lowest since 10th August 2020, when 51,296 cases were registered. The 696 deaths were the lowest since 27th July 2020, when 638 deaths were registered. Even active cases in Mumbai dropped by 16% to 22,639 on 11th Oct, as compared the figure of one month back. The death rate dipped to 2.1% during this period, where as cumulative death rate fell from 4.9% to 4.14 % during this period. In Maharashtra state after almost two months of registering a five digit tally of Corona cases, on Monday the state recorded only 7089 cases. The death toll also fell to 165 after fortnight of registering 350 to 400 deaths on daily basis. Now if you see the figures of Maharashtra state- 15.35 Lakh (cases), 40,514 (deaths), 12.’82 Lakh (recovered), while the figure of Mumbai are-2.31 Lakh (cases), 9,469 (deaths) and 1.96 Lakh (recovered).
All these figures are giving the hopes that Covid cases may be on decline, but we all should proceed with caution and should not relax, as Covid can again try to reach peak if we let our guard down, as happening in so many other countries. In my opinion next 6 months are going to be very crucial for the country as far as Covid is concerned, because with the opening of economy and so much of lockdown restrictions being withdrawn, we should not give opportunity to Covid to come back.
Awaiting your views/comments/feed back.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
13th October 2020