Jew World Order

• West Bengal: Hundreds of miners trapped underground when the lifts failed
  
• Delhi: Metro services were stopped temporarily in the capital and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide
• Officials said the northern and eastern grids had both collapsed
• Unclear why the grid collapsed but the power minister said some states may have been using too much power
  

By
Jill Reilly

PUBLISHED:

07:30 EST, 31 July 2012

|

UPDATED:

11:37 EST, 31 July 2012

A massive power failure has hit India for a second day running, leaving more than half the country without power.

It was caused when three regional power grids collapsed, meaning over 600 million people are without power.

Hundreds of miners were trapped underground in the eastern state of West Bengal when the lifts failed, metro services were stopped temporarily in the capital and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide.

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Failure: Hundreds of miners were trapped underground in the eastern state of West Bengal when the lifts failed, metro services were stopped in the capital, pictured, and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide

Chaos: Streets are packed in heavy traffics following the power outage. India’s energy crisis spread over half the country when both its eastern and northern electricity grids collapsed, leaving 600 million people without power in one of the world’s biggest-ever blackouts

‘The north, northeastern and the eastern
grids are down but we are working and we will have them restored
shortly,’ Naresh Kumar, said a spokesman at the Powergrid Corporation of
India Ltd.

Federal Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters that the monster outage, which struck around 1:00 pm (0730 GMT) in the middle of the working day, was caused by states drawing power ‘beyond their permissible limits.’

There appeared to have been a domino effect, with the northern grid drawing too heavily on the eastern grid which in turn led the northeastern grid to collapse.

‘Half the country is without power. It’s a situation totally without precedent,’ said Vivek Pandit, an energy expert at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Essential: Many people used their back-up generators as well as hospitals

Power was gradually flickering back in some areas several hours after the crisis struck, but was not expected to be fully restored until later in the day.

In New Delhi, the metro train system came to a standstill and traffic lights were out, causing chaos for a second day after a failure on the northern grid on Monday which caused the nation’s worst outage in more than a decade.

‘Drivers of all the metro trains have been asked to stop at the stations. No passengers will be allowed in the metro station until power is restored,’ said a spokeswoman for the network which carries two million people a day.

The city’s hospitals and airports, accustomed to the regular outages caused by load-shedding, said they had switched to generators and back-up systems to keep their operations running normally.

Halted: Metro services were stopped temporarily in the capital and hundreds of trains were held up nationwide

Dilshad Garden Metro Station main gate has been closed the electricity grid across northern India failed on Monday

Waiting game: Passengers wait for a train at a railway station during the power outage in New Delhi

About 400 trains on the extensive
national railway network were affected by the outage, a spokesman for
the railways explained, with all operations stopped in Uttar Pradesh.

With nearly 200 million people, this one state alone has a population
bigger than Brazil’s.

In the
east, the massive city of Kolkata went without power as did the
surrounding state of West Bengal as the eastern grid, which supplies
five states, failed under the stress of over-demand.

‘This is the worst power crisis in the
region. We were supplying power to the northern grid and this power
sharing has led to the collapse,’ said West Bengal Power Minister, Manish
Gupta.

Collapsed: ‘The north, northeastern and the eastern grids are down but we are working and we will have them restored shortly,’ Naresh Kumar, said a spokesman at the Powergrid Corporation of India Ltd

A huge traffic jam was witnessed near Karkardi More in the capital as traffic signals were not functioning following a massive power failure at northern grid

West Bengal
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters that ‘hundreds’ of miners
had been trapped in mines operated by the government-owned Eastern
Coalfields Ltd in Burdwan, about 180 kilometres (110 miles) northwest of
Kolkata.

‘All efforts are
on to resume power supplies. You need power supplies to run the lifts in
the underground mines,’ she said, while declaring that state employees
could go home for the day.

Smriti Mehra, a teller in a Bank of India branch in New Delhi, said the latest outage had caused chaos at work.

‘Our
main server is down. We have had to send back so many of our customers.
There is no internet, nothing is working,’ Mehra said.

‘It is a total breakdown of everything in our office,’ she added.

On
Monday, the northern grid collapsed for six hours shortly after 2:00 am
(2030 GMT Sunday), causing massive travel disruption and widespread
inconvenience in nine states including the capital New Delhi.

In total, 20 out of 29 states were affected today, according to an AFP calculation.

Shinde,
the power minister, had called Monday’s outage a ‘failure’ but also
boasted that India had been quick to restore power, unlike the United
States which took days to restore electricity after a 2003 blackout on
its eastern seaboard.

He and the rest of the government woke up today to a barrage of calls for urgent reform of the power sector.

Leading
the charge were business lobby groups who said yesterday’s outage
underlined the government’s inability to address India’s perennial
electricity shortfall.

‘The
increasing gap between electricity supply and demand has long been a
matter of concern,’ said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the
Confederation of Indian Industry.

The
CII, Banerjee said, has ‘consistently highlighted’ the need for urgent
steps to improve supplies of coal to thermal power plants and reforming
state distribution utilities.’

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