Imagine going to bed at 10:50 pm…
and waking up the next afternoon with still no power.
No fans. No coolers. No water.
Just heat. And silence.
That's exactly what hundreds of families in Grewal Colony, Ludhiana just lived through.
Late Sunday night, residents spotted smoke curling out of their local transformer.
Within minutes — flames.
The culprit? An oil leak.
The fire didn't kill the transformer itself.
It devoured the cables connected to it.
And just like that, the lights went out across the colony.
Residents say they had been flagging this oil leak to PSPCL for days.
No repairs. No checks. No action.
Until the transformer literally caught fire.
"This could have been avoided," they're saying — and honestly, it's hard to argue.
This is the cruel domino effect nobody outside the colony talks about.
Sunita, a resident, put it plainly:
"With fans and coolers not working, it became extremely difficult to stay indoors. Many households ran out of water by morning."
Fire brigade controlled the blaze. No injuries, thankfully.
But restoring power meant replacing every damaged cable.
PSPCL eventually rerouted load through an alternate feeder.
Final damage estimate: ₹50,000.
XEN Jagmohan Singh admitted what residents already knew —
transformer faults and overloading complaints have spiked this summer.
It's the pattern.
A leaking transformer. Repeated complaints. Zero preventive action.
And a city baking under a heatwave that isn't going anywhere.
Rajesh Kumar, another resident, said it best:
"Every time a transformer develops a fault, restoration takes several hours."
Except this time it took seventeen.
Infrastructure doesn't fail loudly.
It fails quietly — one ignored complaint at a time.
And then, one night, it goes up in smoke.
That's all for now!
