Mohali Power Outage Hits 36 Hours Amid Strike
- Mohali neighborhoods stayed without electricity for more than 36 hours after storm damage collided with a PSPCL staff strike, leaving repairs painfully slow. - Residents in Phase 5, Sector 71 and nearby areas said only 4 linemen were handling city supply, while some families shifted to hotels. - The outage lands after weeks of Punjab power stress, with overloaded grids, planned cuts, and storm damage already straining Mohali.
Power cuts are common enough in Indian summers. But Mohali’s latest breakdown turned into something harsher — a city-scale reminder that power systems fail twice, first in the wires and then in the workforce. After a hailstorm and thunderstorm damaged equipment, whole pockets of Mohali stayed dark for more than 36 hours. The bigger problem was that repair crews were already stretched by a strike, so faults that might have been cleared faster just sat there. ### What actually knocked the power out? The first hit was weather. A storm over Punjab damaged transmission and distribution equipment across the state, with PSPCL putting total losses around ₹8 crore. Mohali was one of the worst-affected districts, and local damage was not minor — poles collapsed near the 66 kV grid in Sector 71, feeders went down, and some areas got only partial or unstable restoration. ### Why did Mohali stay dark so long? Because damaged hardware is only half the story. Mohali’s restoration was slowed by a strike involving electricity department staff, which meant fewer people were available to patrol lines, replace damaged components, and re-energize feeders safely. Residents told local media that just 4 linemen were managing the city’s supply during the crunch. That turns every fault into a queue. ### Which areas were hit hardest? The reports point to a patchwork of pain rather than one clean blackout. Phase 5, Sector 71, Phase 2, Sector 54, parts of Phase 7, Phase 3B1, Phase 3B2, and other pockets saw long outages, weak voltage, or only single-phase supply. In Phase 2 alone, nearly 70 to 80 houses were still without power and drinking water more than 30 hours after the storm. ### Why did residents start leaving home? Because once an outage drags past a day, it stops being just about lights and fans. Water pumps fail, inverters run out, mobile networks get patchy, and refrigerators start becoming a problem. Some Mohali families reportedly shifted to hotels in places linked to displacement. ### Was this only a storm problem? Not really. Mohali has been dealing with a more structural power problem for a while — overloaded 11 kV lines, overloaded substations, radial supply in some grids, and infrastructure that has not kept pace with urban growth. One Mohali-circle official said the system was already brittle. ### How bad has Punjab’s wider power stress been? Pretty visible even before this outage. In late April, PSPCL published planned cuts affecting at least 273 locations across Punjab during peak heat, then capped planned outages at 4 hours a day after backlash. Add a fresh storm on top of that, and you get a grid of stresses overlapped. ### So what’s the real lesson here? A power outage that lasts 36 hours is never just one broken feeder. It is damaged poles, weak redundancy, overloaded infrastructure, and not enough crews on the ground — all stacking at once. Mohali’s blackout matters because it shows how quickly a stressed urban grid can tip from routine disruption into a public-health and livability problem when weather and labor trouble land together.
