Summary In Karachi, 36 grid stations tripped, plunging at least 70 per cent of the city into darkness.
LAHORE (Dunya news) - Electricity supply to different areas of the country was partially restored on Monday morning after the breakdown of a major plant caused power stations to stop working across the country.
The breakdown affected all the major cities including Islamabad‚ Rawalpindi‚ Lahore‚ Quetta‚ Karachi and Peshawar.
While power cuts are common in Pakistan due to chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, outages across the whole country are rare.
Late Sunday s blackout occurred when the HUBCO plant in southwestern Balochistan province, which generates 1,200 megawatts a day of electricity, developed a technical fault, a power ministry official said.
That breakdown prompted a "cascading effect" which caused plants nationwide to shut down, said Rai Sikandar.
"It was a technical fault in one of our power plants and not in the national grid," he insisted, adding that electricity was gradually being restored across Pakistan after it remained off for more than two hours.
Another ministry official said power should be back on across the country within two hours.
He said that all 24 power stations in the capital Islamabad were working again and electricity was being restored in parts of all the country s four provinces.
"1,200 megawatts of electricity is back in the national grid with the restoration of different power stations," said the official.
He said Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf has directed to probe into the crisis and a special committee has been formed for this purpose.
"It would be pre-mature at this stage to speculate about the nature of the fault that caused the plant to fail," the official said.
