The untold story about Power Minister Nilesh Cabral

Ponda: Even as many might have cursed government for electricity outage during the night of Thursday, few knew that Power Minister Nilesh Cabral himself was standing in the heavy rains to get the power restored, setting an example.

Cabral stood in heavy rains at Ponda sub stations for hours together in the night of Thursday monitoring the work of restoring the line, and even used his personal contacts to get resources like cranes to lift the linesmen during dead end of the night.

The story of South Goa witnessing power cut started on Wednesday night when Southern grid failed snapping the power supply to the State. This happened in the night when State was reeling through fear of Cyclone Vayu and pre-monsoon showers had already started hitting the state.

As a temporary measure, the line connecting Ponda to Xeldem pulling 40 MW power was used to supply power to South Goa. Since it could not fulfil the demand of consumers, the second line with similar capacity was also put in action.

But the troubles were far from over. In the afternoon of Thursday, the second line developed problem cutting short the power supply to South.

The Electricity department officials had to walk down on their foot to track the fault, which was finally located at 8 p.m.

Ideally under normal circumstances, the work would have started next day, that is today, but Cabral ensured that the workers don’t delay any further and he himself went to the site at Ponda.

The minister reached site at 10 p.m. Amidst the heavy rains, it was difficult for linesmen in the night to climb the polls which are as high as 25 metres and above.

Cabral, using his personal influence, got a crane which arrived at mid night to lift the linesmen up and finally at 3 in the morning of Thursday, the line was restored again.

The minister was standing there till the linesmen got down after successfully completing their mission.