Government urged to provide safety to KESC employees

The Karachi Electric Supply Company's officers and field staff continued to receive threats and attacks from the striking CBA Union and their external armed connivers on Sunday as several employees were severely beaten while attending to public complaints in respect of faults in local network and overhead cables.
The union has been subverting and blocking the KESC's normal functioning all across the city for one whole week now. From recently, the law enforcement agencies have been protecting the utility's offices, assets and employees at different places. Their cover has brought down the number of attacks though it has not stopped as yet.
The KESC has been carrying out its normal load shedding plan all across the city under which residential and commercial areas seeing 3 to 5 hours of load shedding during 24 hours, while the industrial areas are exempted from load shedding as usual. The pending local fault issues are very few in numbers and restricted to small areas. The KESC has discarded the claim by certain quarters that load shedding duration has been extended and said that neither the load shedding timing was extended nor there are any enhanced outages at local level.
In one development of planned sabotage and harassment, a KESC supervisor was intercepted by masked armed men Sunday morning while he was proceeding on his motorbike to attend a complaint in Korangi Sector 31-F. They talked to him in clear terms and insulted and abused him for performing his duties against the policy of CBA Union, which had been blocking KESC staff from work. They beat him up severely causing serious injuries to his head and ears. His colleagues have expressed concern over the threatening situation and have demanded the government to provide safety to KESC employees who are risking their lives to perform their duties for the sake of the citizens of Karachi. Another group of CBA miscreants were already waiting at a fault location at Old Golimar when a jointer electrician reached there to repair the fault. The armed group abused and misbehaved with him and stopped him from correcting the fault by force.
More threats and attacks were reported from different areas of the City as the KESC teams started to put back in place the jeopardised power distribution and maintenance system in the city that was attacked and sabotaged by the CBA Union and its external connivers along the past week. Law enforcement agencies have been supporting and protecting the KESC employees for the sake of providing relief to general public by restoring the maintenance mechanism relating to local faults and other minor issues at a number of PMTs, feeders and over head low tension cable network.
The public complaints over local faults started to pile up last Monday when the CBA Union threatened and assaulted KESC employees to block the normal repair and maintenance work in response to complaints. The utility's business operation centres and complaint offices across the city had been rendered non-functional while the Union activists harassed away the employees and stopped MTLs from moving out. The Union hooligans also burnt and disconnected the power supply system at many places and disabled cable network at several points. Grid stations and sub-stations were attacked and the equipment and cables stolen.
All areas of electronics market had been normalised at Abdulullah Haroon road Saddar. In Korangi Industrial Model Zone network has been put back into operation while the customer care section is yet to be normalised. The over head faults caused by sabotage which had been normalised by KESC maintenance teams include Madina Colony overhead, N. Fiber-II overhead, D-Area overhead jumper, Forbous Chloride overhead high tension conductor, Pigasus overhead high tension conductors, Gas Turbine overhead leads and jumpers.
The KESC complaint crew checked and revealed that Hashoo Centre sub-station, Hashami Market PMT and Al-Falah PMT had been stopped from functioning. The CBA Union carried out this sabotage on the excuse of protesting for its demands although the Sindh High Court had already declared any protest by KESC Union as illegal and unjustified and had stopped the CBA Union from protesting near to the utility offices and installations. The Court has also extended the stay order stopping the Union's protest till May 24.
The maintenance teams found out that Landhi Grid PMT, Polytrade overhead high tension conductor, Fakharia overhead in Sector 7-A area, Vocational overhead, IIL overhead and Millat Town overhead had been tempered with as cables and conductors had been broken and removed. The Korangi West transformer was also found tripped and it was revealed on checking that a piece of wire put by someone had caused it. The KESC understands that the general public needed to help the utility in this situation in the sense that in case they watch anyone damaging or destroying the power supply system, or if they observe any suspicious activity, they may inform the nearest KESC office or police immediately in order to thwart the attempt. This way the citizens could help the utility to defeat the negative elements from pursuing their personal agenda. The KESC believes that the power supply system would be restored to a great extent by the weekend. The KESC has assured the Karachi consumers that all efforts would be made to attend to the local faults on emergency footings and to provide better services to the city.-PR