Hyderabad: Trees are to be blamed for the city’s power outages, say officials. “There have been incidents where power supply was tripped after branches fell on power lines. The branches are very close to the lines and in most areas, they touch the lines at even a small gust of wind,” said J. Srinivasa Reddy, director (Operations) of TSSPDCL.

According to official estimates, nearly 11000 hours of power outage was registered in 11 months between March 2014 and February 1, 2015, in the six circles of Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts.

In the first six months of the current financial year, there were black outs for more than 5200 hours in the entire TSSPDCL limits.

In Greater Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy South topped the list, accounting for 2458 hours. The cuts were more in the Old City limits (Hyderabad South) where domestic and commercial consumers had to spend more than 1200 hours without power.

The contract for cutting branches has been given to private contractors but they have not being doing a proper job; and no one from the department checks if the work has been done or not.

Another major reason for the power outages has been lack of maintenance of lines. Technical staff, mostly linemen, who are supposed check lines, transformers, capacitors, insulators and other equipment regularly, are deployed for non-technical works like billing, collection and some other clerical works. For the first 15 days of the month, they are busy in billing work and later in collection.

“They attend only when a breakdown is reported. A person has to travel at least 5 km to attend to the problems and if the problem is big, then it takes time to address it. Sometimes, we may have to change the HT wires or capacitors and our men have to come back and take the material back to the spot,” a senior official of TSSPCL said.

“If we are limited to technical work alone, we can concentrate on it and if the lines are checked regularly, like gangmen checking railway tracks, 70 per cent of problems can be rectified before their occur,” said linemen Mr Santosh Reddy and Mr Yadagiri.

Also inferior quality of fuse wire, weak binding, not cleaning of discs at the poles, outdated capacitors, transformers and failure of insulators are reasons for frequent outages.