Country Wide Power Outage in Pakistan

By Elijah Mt. Castle and Feng Chi, Hsu

Pakistan’s national power grid experienced a blackout lasting 18 hours in most areas. The power failure was caused by “an engineering fault” in southern Pakistan. The fault engaged safety systems across the grid and shut down the power plants across the country. The blackout left millions of people in the dark. Airports were disrupted and major cities were left in the dark. Power has since been restored. No major accidents were reported. In 2018 Pakistan’s grid was partially disrupted for more than nine hours. A major power outage also occurred in 2015 a major power line broke down which knocked out power for around 80 percent of Pakistan, allegedly the outage in 2015 was caused by rebel groups. Pictured are the EOG nighttime lights for January 8th and 9th.

January 11, 2021