Chennai: Power cuts continued to affect several neighborhoods across the city through Sunday, with a nearly 22-hour outage at Apollo Hospital in Perungudi intensifying public concern. Electricity supply to the hospital was cut around 2:30 pm on Saturday, and videos and photographs showing darkened sections of the premises, a nurse using an ambu bag to assist a critically ill patient's breathing, and the beeping of UPS systems quickly circulated on social media.
Hospital Response and Patient Transfer
Hospital sources said one critically ill patient on life support was shifted from the intensive care unit to the group's Greams Road facility as a precaution. “We went into complete darkness a little before midnight. Our medical team had followed emergency protocols and continued care for the remaining patients until generator backup was activated,” said a senior doctor who was on duty.
Cause of the Outage
Officials of the Tamil Nadu Power Distribution Corporation Ltd (TNPDCL) said supply to the hospital was restored around 12:30 pm on Sunday, nearly 22 hours after the outage began. A superintending engineer in the Adyar division said the failure had been traced to an aging underground cable running from the ring main unit outside the hospital to the metering point. “The hospital had functioned on generator power for much of the disruption. A complication arose on Saturday night when the management tried to shift to an alternative generator. It took a few minutes before the connection could be established. That failure briefly plunged parts of the hospital into darkness,” he said.
Government Response
In a post on social media, Electricity Minister R Nirmalkumar said the hospital went dark for “around 7 to 10 minutes” because of a generator malfunction, adding, “We have alerted all districts on addressing the supply to critical installations and coordination with PWD electrical in respect of government hospitals and private hospitals.”
Recommendations for Uninterrupted Supply
Another TNPDCL official said the hospital's service was linked to a single feeder and argued that institutions requiring uninterrupted supply should ideally be connected to at least two feeders. “We recommend this as such an arrangement could have reduced restoration time if one source failed,” he said.
Widespread Power Cuts
The Apollo outage was not an isolated episode. Residents in Kolathur, Thiru-Vi-Ka Nagar, and Wimco Nagar in north Chennai, and in Sholinganallur, Medavakkam, and Pudupakkam in the south reported power cuts on Sunday morning. Tangedco officials attributed those interruptions to the tripping of an 11-kV feeder in north Chennai and a failure in incoming supply to the Sithalapakkam substation, and said that service was restored later in the day.
Misinformation Warning
By Sunday evening, TNPDCL was also battling a second problem: misinformation. The utility warned consumers against fake shutdown messages circulating on social media and urged them to verify such claims before sharing them.
