Overheated power infra catches fire, causes 10-hour outage in Gurugram

A power outage affected around 4,500 families in Gurugram for up to 10 hours due to overheating feeder cables, causing widespread disruption.

Gurugram: At least a dozen families residing across luxury and affordable housing societies in sectors 99 to 102 along the Dwarka expressway suffered a massive power outage of up to 10 hours until Thursday morning after underground feeder cables supplying electricity to these areas allegedly caught fire from overheating, residents said.

Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam workers replace a transformer in Sector-11 on Khandsa Road (Parveen Kumar/Hindustan Times)

According to officials of the Dakshin Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam Limited (DHBVNL), the feeders caught fire between 11.20pm and 11.30pm at their origin outside the Sector 9 substation. Officials added that they temporarily shut down the electricity supply as a precautionary measure.

The fire department was alerted and tenders were rushed to the 220kV substation to douse the flames.

However, a senior discom official said, repair work could not start immediately because they had to wait for the feeders to cool down. “Extreme ambient temperature, combined with the heat generated from overloading, caused the fire in the 11kV feeders,” the official said.

Besides the outage, residents in several societies said they still lacked electricity supply after the feeder cables were restored, likely due to internal infrastructure faults caused by overloading.

Residents claimed that at least 4,500 to 5,000 families living across these societies were affected by the outage, forcing them to stay up all night. They added that the worst-affected areas were affordable housing societies, which lack power backup facilities.

Santosh Singh, a resident of Pareena Laxmi in Sector 99A, said the outage started around 11.30pm on Wednesday. “The supply was restored twice in two hours. However, the outage started again at 1am, which was finally restored by 9.30am on Thursday,” he said.

Singh said all their inverter batteries were drained, and residents could not sleep all night. “Had the 220kV substation in Sector 99 been functional, this situation would not have arisen,” he added

Akshit Mohan, another resident of the society, claimed that discom officials provided no proper update on when the supply would be restored.

“The electricity infrastructure is in such poor shape that supply restoration took nine hours in a city like Gurugram,” Mohan added.

Parveen Thakur, a Conscient Habitat resident, said at least a dozen societies suffered from the outage. “A majority of these societies are powered by 11kv feeders installed by the builder, which frequently develop faults from overloading. The developer needs to replace them with 33kV cables, but no action is being taken,” he added.

Dhiraj Mehta, RWA general secretary of BPTP Amstoria in Sector 102, said their township faced an outage of up to seven hours. “It turned out to be the society’s internal fault, which took the society’s technical team several hours to identify and repair. Infrastructure needs to be strengthened,” he said.

Meanwhile, another DHBVN official said that after the affected feeders cooled down, the load from the societies facing the outage was diverted to different feeders, partially restoring power supply. All these societies are currently powered through 11kV feeder cables, which are overheating due to load and ambient temperature. They need to shift to 33kV feeders to mitigate outages and overloading issues,” he said.