CHENNAI: Residents said the power cuts in the past two months, which has worsened in the recent days, have upended their daily life. They said in many cases, the officials are not answering calls during outages nor are they responding to complaints.
In Perambur, among the worst-hit areas, Raghukumar Choodamani of the Perambur Neighbourhood Development Forum said outages occur three to four times every night, lasting between 20 minutes and an hour.
A four-hour daytime outage earlier this week was traced to a trip in the main grid. EB officials, he said, have told residents plainly that the existing infrastructure cannot handle the load.
“Several high-rise buildings have come up in Perambur without corresponding upgrades to the power distribution infrastructure,” he said. With their sleep disrupted, senior citizens and school-going children are having a hard time, he added.
In Kodambakkam, a resident, K Vetrivel, counted three outages on Wednesday night alone, the first lasting for an hour. Akbarabad, he added, saw a four-hour cut on Tuesday night followed by a three-hour outage the next day. At Periyar Pathai in Choolaimedu, there was no power through the night on three occasions last week.
RWA federation president D Neelakantan of Madhavaram said he had tried reaching out to officials in vain when the outages were severe.