Power supply restored to Oman's Eastern province after two-day outage

Muscat: Large swathes of the Eastern region of the sultanate, which were without power for nearly two days, are now back online after authorities successfully addressed a network malfunction that triggered one of Oman's most serious outages in modern times.

Thousands of residents of three districts - Jaalan Bani Bu Ali, Jaalan Bani Bu Hassan and Al Kamil wal Wafi which border the Rimal al Sharqiya desert - had to endure prolonged blackouts since Saturday when supply was first disrupted by a network glitch.

Given the seriousness of the outage, and with technicians unable to pinpoint the problem, authorities constituted an ‘Emergency Committee' headed by the Chairman of the Public Authority for Electricity and Water (PAEW), to address the crisis. The heads of various utilities serving the Eastern region were also enlisted on the panel.

Supply restored Monday afternoon

Supply was eventually restored early on Monday afternoon after technicians isolated two malfunctioning grid transformers which had inexplicably failed. Furthermore, as a precaution against possible new breakdowns, authorities have also begun moving diesel-powered mobile generation sets to the area.

Meanwhile, Oman Electricity Transmission Company (OETC) - the country's main transmission utility - said it had sought the help of a German expert to determine why a backup grid transformer had also broken down when it was supposed to kick in upon the failure of the main transformer. The collapse of both grid transformers - for reasons termed as "unexpected and unexplained" - had led to the unprecedented outage.

In a statement, OETC's General Manager, Ali Al Haddabi, apologies to consumers who had been affected by the blackout, and pledged efforts to ensure uninterrupted supply to the area.