CHENNAI: Chief Secretary Shiv Das Meena on Thursday said power supply has been restored to 99.57% of places in Chennai and supply would be restored in the rest of the places by Friday evening.
Addressing a press conference at the secretariat, he said, “There has been a vast improvement in the entire situation during the past 24 hours. There are 17,704 distribution centres in Chennai. Of them, power has been restored in 99.57% of centres. Power is yet to be restored only in 77 power distribution centres for precautionary reasons.”
Power supply is yet to be restored in Kannadasan Nagar, MKB Nagar, Krishnamoorthy Nagar, in Vyasarpadi area, Pallikaranai Marsh, and Madipakkam. In the four districts, there are 40,075 distribution centres and of them, only 655 have to be restored. For HT lines, supply has been restored fully. All sub-stations have started working and only in certain distribution stations, supply is yet to be restored.
The number of people given shelter in relief camps has decreased from 41,406 to 18,750 in four districts. On Wednesday, complaints were received from 800 locations, and water is being evacuated in only 342 places as of Thursday morning. On Thursday too, distribution of 3,000 food packets was done by helicopters in South Chennai.
Traffic has been opened in 20 subways out of the 22 in Chennai. The government has pressed into service mobile vegetable shops following complaints that vegetables are being sold by individuals at higher prices. Meena told reporters that the Thirupugazh Committee suggested long-term and stort term measures for improving intergrated storm water drains at a cost of Rs 1,000 crore and some of the recommendations were implemented. This resulted in many areas of the city, including T Nagar not getting inundated. However, he did not delve on the details of the report.