MAPUSA
Residents of the coastal villages of Anjuna and Assagao were left in darkness on Friday after a major power outage, caused by a fault in a 33kV underground power cable, disrupted Diwali celebrations across the area.
The outage lasted for nearly 18 hours on Laxmi Pooja day, one of the most significant days of the Diwali festival.
The issue began around 3 am when a fault developed in the power cable supplying the Anjuna substation, plunging both Anjuna-Caisua and Assagao-Badem villages into an early morning blackout.
As residents faced the outage, electricity department teams scrambled to locate the fault, deploying an underground fault detection machine that eventually identified the issue near Assagao around 2.30 pm.
With power restoration efforts underway, the electricity department provided limited, rotational power to some areas in Anjuna, Badem, and Assagao as a temporary measure.
By 9.30 pm, however, full power had not yet been restored, leaving many residents in the dark during the Laxmi Pooja celebrations.
"Due to the extent of the fault, we had to provide power supply on a rotational basis as a temporary arrangement," a senior engineer from the power department stated.
He confirmed that repair efforts were ongoing with the goal of restoring full power as quickly as possible.
The outage led to widespread frustration, with locals expressing disappointment over the impact on their Diwali celebrations.
The department continued efforts to repair the faulty cable late into the night, hoping to bring an end to the unplanned blackout by early Saturday morning.
