Load shedding
Jinaan Khadeejah, East Ashkona, Uttara, Dhaka
The countrywide perennial problem of load shedding is going on unabated this summer. A few days ago the situation was even worse. In spite of DESA's initiatives to repair and upgrade the faulty underground cable network in Dhanmondi area, the solution to this long-standing problem still remains an elusive goal. The energy minister maintains that this load shedding problem will be solved within a few years, just as his predecessors used to say. And as usual these few years seems to be endless. All our ardent pleadings, vociferous demands and earnest requests yielded no positive results at all. And writing on this topic has become some sort of litany to many and as a result more and more people are growing despondent over this. The problem, if anything, is worsening every year.I was amused when I heard on the BBC about the major blackout that occurred in some cities of the mighty America and Canada. The disaster struck in late evening and forced many people to spend the night outside, on the roads, subways, stations and pavements or any space under the open sky. President Bush himself said no terrorist attack was behind this incident. Authorities said that this extensive technical failure might have been caused by lightning or small fire. It was a rare occurrence. No such incident was reported since 1965.After that some back-up measures were taken but all of them failed this time. Power grid operators said that negligence in modernising some power-transmission infrastructure, which runs on a fairly old method, let this happen on a greater scale. However, it was amazing that America, despite being at the helm of global power, experienced such catastrophe because of poor and old infrastructure just like our unfortunate third world country. So we cannot blame our authorities much and it is proved that even the most advanced countries of the world fail, rarely though, in power transmission. But in our case, it is a regular phenomenon.
|
|
