Millions Without Power in North India, Water May Be Next

Tens of millions of people in North India were without power and early morning commutes in Delhi were thrown into chaos Monday after a massive electrical grid failure. Water supplies may be seriously disrupted this evening, because of the power problems, officials said.

“We are presently busy at restoring the grid,” said S.K. Soonee, chief executive of Power System Operation, part of state-run Power Grid, which manages the transmission grids in the country. He said it’s difficult to say what caused the outage. “Things should be looking up soon,” he said, but added he didn’t want to give a specific time frame.

Power was out in the entire state of Rajasthan, population 67 million, for several hours Monday morning after the grid failure, which happened around 2:30 a.m. Other states affected included Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. An estimated 360 million people were affected by the outage.

A water shortage could be next. Delhi residents are likely to have some water problems this evening, Sanjam Cheema, a spokeswoman for the Delhi Jal Board, said Monday. The water treatment process requires power, she said, and Delhi Water Board’s seven water treatment plants don’t have a backup power system, because they require “hundreds of megawatts” to operate.

Some of the board’s underground reservoirs were also affected because of disturbances in the local area distribution grid. “There’s little one can do,” she said. Because water treatment plants “work 24 hours, even slight disruptions can affect them,” she said. The water board can’t predict how severe water problems will be, but is trying to keep water tankers on hand, she said.

Power was out in many parts of India’s capital city early Monday morning, and the Delhi Metro, which carries almost 2 million passengers a day, was completely down for several hours. Delhi Metro officials said that by 8:30 a.m. services were at 50 percent of capacity, and they were running completely by 9:00 a.m. Services from Noida, an East Delhi suburb, were running slowly and cars were crowded, commuters said.

Power supplies in Delhi were bolstered by hydropower from several sources, including a project in Tala, Bhutan.

On Saturday, in an unrelated incident, a cat leapt into a Delhi grid station and was electrocuted, causing a fire that left parts of East Delhi without power for 24 hours. “The cat must have been wet,” a spokesperson for electric company BSES told The Hindu.