By Tenson Zobo
Lilongwe Water Board (LWB) has said the prolonged power outages will negatively affect the delivery of its services like pumping of waters and the development spoils Lilongwe resident’s Christmas as the problem is expected to have been fixed after 18 hours since yesterday.
“Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi (Escom) visited our offices at 11PM last night to found out the root course of the problem. The problem has been identified and progress is there. They were searching for spare parts now it has been found the operation is underway to maintain the broken part, they have assured us that in next six hours they will be done hence we will be recovering some of the areas”, said Chikuni.
Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer for LWB Alfonso Chikuni, also said that the deliberate measures have been put in place to avoid future power failures. The provision of water bowsers is among the strategies but we can only start after we have started treatment at the main plant.
Chikuni bemoaned the barbarous acts on environment at Dzalanyama Forest Reserve where cases of cutting down trees carelessly are increasing at alarming rate. Therefore, urging all concerned authorities to join hands to fighting the ma-practice of degradation of the environment.
The prolonged power outages mostly led to loss of business and perishable food items apart from creating conducive environment for criminal activities in areas where power is off.
However, management of Escom has in the past few days been publishing notices in the media apologizing to its customers across the country for the loss of power resulting from faulty transformers, prolonged heavy rainfalls and unlawful human activities.
For instance, the loss of power is mostly due to a number of faults on transformers which have either been vandalized or have developed technical faults. “Escom wishes to assure the valued customers that repair works are underway, thus, to restore supplies within the shortest possible time”, Ironically Escom says in the statements.
