load shedding
the deliberate shutdown of electric power in a part or parts of a power-distribution system, generally to prevent the failure of the entire system when the demand strains the capacity of the system.
Retrieved July 12, 2009, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/load shedding
Currently we face undergo four hours without power here in Islamabad and it is even worse in some other parts of the country. To top it, our power line broke down in the early hours of Saturday morning and we were left panting and heaving with heat for the next eight hours. And of course, the complaint center had taken its phone off the hook. From experience, we know that as long the phone is "busy" the fault is still being traced and no end is in sight. And when they do answer it is usually a promise of power returning within an hour, but it rarely happens and we go back to the phone being "busy". It is a futile exercise really but being without power, we have little else to do. It is either that or running around the roof in the early hours of the day, as our neighbors seem to prefer. Only, they like our roof much better than their own.
Not to forget, there is another form of power outage of 10-15 minutes and this is also sudden and unannounced. This happens when our grid "heats up".
It is reassuring however to realize that we have come through a few years of this and what is wrong with putting up with another few!
Being without power in the summer is just miserable, and so much worse when you have children involved. It is a lot of hard work when you don't want to do anything!
ReplyDeleteI have heard of that happening--it's so hard when it is very hot and humid! It is so hot here that it is dangerous to be outside for very long--I am not sure what we would do with extended power outages...but people survived here in the past, somehow! I think they didn't move during the day when it is this hot (42C yesterday).
ReplyDeleteUgh. I remember this happening the first summer I lived in Ankara. The Muncipality would randomly turn off power to sectors for hours and hours. It was up to 46C that summer and it was too hot to walk on the roads etc. Then they also decided to cut water! So in some places you had power but no water and others you had water and no power. Miserable couple of months (August was particularly bad).
ReplyDeleteSounds miserable to be without power for so long.
ReplyDeleteWe have had that happen, but not for so long and not every day.