13 Hours With No Electricity

Last month the power went out in my neighborhood for around 8 hours, this weekend it went out for 13. The thing is, it shouldn’t have been out for that long.

At exactly 9PM the power was cut in my neighborhood, the fact it was cut at exactly 9PM leads me to believe this was a planed maintenance cut. The problem though the portable generators like the one pictured above only arrived to my neighborhood at 1AM. There were 8 trucks and by the time they were all connected to the various power transformers around the block, buildings only started getting electricity by 3AM. By 4AM all the buildings got electricity except mine. Now if you’re planning on cutting the power off to hundreds of families in the middle of the hottest month of the year, at the very least have the generators ready to be plugged in ASAP so that people don’t have to suffer. Or, how about notifying the neighborhood by placing posters at the entrance of the buildings that will be affected to let them know that power will be cut off at this day at this time so that people can be prepared.

Now as I mentioned, by 4AM power was restored to all the buildings except mine. So me and some neighbors called up 152 which is the hotline for Electricity & Water Emergency. 152 was pretty useless. They transferred us to the electricity office up the street from my building in Salmiya. We explained to them what the problem was and they told us they had nothing to do with it and that we needed to contact the electricity office in Jabriya. We called Jabriya up and they were like this has nothing to do with us and that we need to contact the Salmiya office. So after running around in circles Jabriya finally agreed to send someone to check it out. by 5:30AM nobody had come yet so we called Jabriya up again. They told us there isn’t anything they can do now since the shift is nearly over and we would have to wait for the new shift at 6AM. 6:15AM we call them back up again, they were like they aren’t going to send someone over because there is maintenance work going on and power will be back soon. We asked if they could tell us where in Salmiya the work was being done so we could pass by them and get a time estimate from them. The guy on the other end got super pissed off, started yelling and telling us its none of our business and we had to end the call. Power came back four hours later 10:12AM.

What a clusterfuck. Whomever is in charge in Salmiya obviously doesn’t care about the residents. I’ve posted about the horrible garbage situation a million times before (still hasn’t been fixed btw), the horrible urban planning, the tall residential buildings with zero parking and now the complete lack of empathy towards its residents. There should be town hall meetings where residents can meet with whomever is in charge so we could voice our complaints. Better yet put me in charge of Salmiya already!