Blackout hits 25 districts unannounced

At least 25 districts of Dhaka, Khulna, Rajshahi, and Barishal divisions were hit by power outages on Tuesday without any prior announcement from the Power Division.

Thousands of people in these districts suffered for up to six hours as the outage started at 9:05am and lasted till 3pm in many areas.

A mechanical fault in the national power grid caused the outage, Md Mustafizur Rahman, executive director (Engineering) additional in-charge of West Zone Power Distribution Company Limited, said.

"I could not, however, find out the details. Controlling the national grid does not fall within our responsibility. The Power Grid Company of Bangladesh Ltd is in charge," he said.

The power supply resumed in some areas of some districts after about an hour of the power outage. But, it took almost six hours for the power supply to resume in all areas of the 25 districts.

Ten districts in Khulna division, five in Dhaka division, six in Barishal division, and four in Rajshahi division suffered power cuts.

"Of these, 21 districts are under our jurisdiction. The rest are under the jurisdiction of the Rajshahi region," Mustafizur Rahman added.

Power Grid Company of Bangladesh's Deputy Manager ABM Badruddoza Khan said, "The outage did not occur due to a frequency problem. A mechanical fault in the national grid was responsible for it. But, the blackout issue was resolved immediately and we are currently working on identifying the mechanical faults."