Kushtia: Around 600,000 customers were left in misery without electricity on Friday as emergency crews were working to revive a substation that caught fire during Cyclone Apmhan on Wednesday night.

More than 100 technicians were desperately trying to restore connections from the national power grid substation in Kushtia by replacing one of the two transformers at the substation and doing other repairs.

Arifur Rahman, a supervising engineer with distributor WZPDCL, said customers in Kushtia, Meherpur, Chuadanga, Jhenaidah and Rajbari were left in the lurch by the power outage.

The fire completely destroyed one transformer at the substation in Bottoil and heavily damaged the other, said Md Masum Ali Bakshi, an executive director at the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh.

The storm delayed the repairs and experts were leading the technicians who were working nonstop, he said.

Pranab Chandra Devnath, an executive engineer at WZPDCL, said the connections will be restored once the substation flickered back to life. They have finished repairing the power lines snapped by the storm, he added,.

It would take two to three days to restore power connections in Kushtia, State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid told bdnews24.com on Thursday.

Sohrab Ali, the general manager of Rural Electrification Board in Kushtia, said they were supplying power to Kushtia city and some important buildings from alternative lines.

https://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2020/05/22/cyclone-amphan-burned-kushtia-substation-knocked-out-power-to-600000-customers