A video of a MSEB (Maharashtra State Electricity Board) worker clinging on wires at great heights to resolve a line fault near Khandala (which caused the citywide power cut in Mumbai on Monday) has led industrialist Anand Mahindra to promise to be more circumspect while complaining about electricity services in the future.
Anand Mahindra was responding to a video shared by Dayanand Kamble, Deputy Director of Maharashtra Information Center, New Delhi. The video showed a worker resolving a fault in the high-tension transmission line which transmits power to the financial capital.
“I will think about and pray for the safety of these high-wire daredevils before complaining again,” Mahindra wrote while retweeting the video on Saturday.
I will think about & pray for the safety of these high-wire daredevils before complaining again... https://t.co/XcoxO4AD7j
— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) October 17, 2020
Shot on a clear day in the ghat section which separates the Western Ghats from the coastal Konkan in the Khandala region, the 57-second video shows a worker slithering down a wire, possibly to reach the exact spot of a fault. The height at which he is working is very perceptible with land mass seen far away below and behind him, and the presence of a lone worker at such great heights illustrates the risks taken.
Dayanand Kamble said this is the fourth day that the employees of MSETCL (Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Company) have been working to resolve the power outage issue.
Earlier this week, MSETCL Chairman and Managing Director Dinesh Waghmare had said that a wire cable carrying power from Talegaon near Pune on the Deccan Plateau to the Kalwa substation on the outskirts of Mumbai had physically snapped in the days leading to the outage.
Waghmare had termed the region in which the fault has occurred as mountainous and hostile from an approach perspective, due to which the problem could not be resolved immediately and the line was shut. Simultaneously, three other lines getting power to Kalwa were either shut or tripped, which led to the grid collapse.
At present, the state-run MSETCL and private sector Tata Power are in a blame game over what led to the major power outage which took over 14 hours to resolve. MSETCL says the islanding system could not be triggered because Tata's generation started very late, while Tata blames a cascading tripping of circuits for the fault.