Massive power blackouts hit Istanbul

ISTANBUL

Turkey’s largest city Istanbul has been hit by power cuts for third day in a row on Dec. 31, prompting Ministry of Energy to release a statement regarding the issue. 

“We are working with the police in cooperation in order to determine the damages,” the statement read, adding that the efforts to resolve the issue have been ongoing with great speed.

“The efforts to repair the damages in the transmission lines that provide for Istanbul, which were caused by heavy snow fall and storm in the north of Marmara Region, have been ongoing with utmost speed. A total of 164 employees in four groups have been working on the issue,” it also said. 

Saying that damages were done to transmission towers, the ministry noted that they are investigating the reason for such damages.  

“We are laying emphasis on all the possibilities on how these damages occured in the lines, of which some were renewed very recently,” it added. 

The city of more than 14mn people straddles Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus Strait. There were also widespread outages on the Asian side of Istanbul on Dec. 30 and electricity providers warned of rolling power cuts into Dec. 31.

Meanwhile, Chamber of Electrical Engineers (EMO) on Dec. 23 has warned that power outages might occur due to wrong policies. It said in a statement that “major grievances” might occur if no urgent intervention was made.