Sharjah Power Outage - Summary

Summary of the Sharjah Power Outages past 1 month.

(Attached is the map highlighting the areas most impacted by the outages in RED)

14 Aug 09 –15 Sep 09 – Intermittent power failures across Sharjah, leading to complete blackout on a number of days.

- Electricity failures continued for few days and no satisfactory explanation from Sewa officials increased doubts on the recovery from the outage. News papers reported that Sewa helpline would not answer calls or were not able to give appropriate clarification to the residents.

- Business Losses - 5-7 million/day as per an economist (Gulf news 14th September 09)

Few quotes from the Sewa officials in the local news papers,

- A senior Sewa official said that the power cut was caused by a problem with one of the main generators, and that the first phase of emergency plan was being implemented – Khaleejtimes 20th Aug 09

- According to Essa Al Zarouni, Director of Control Section at Sewa, the power outage occurred because the electricity supplied was more than capacity- Khaleejtimes 20th Aug 09

- A senior official at the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (Sewa) said the power outage occurred due to an overload at one of the generators at the main power plant- Gulf News 27th Aug 09

Points to note -

• Street lights continue to be switched on as early as 06:00 in the morning


• No compensation plan for companies who incurred losses


• Sewa management has till date not disclosed the exact reason for these intermittent outages, but has accepted that the authorities were not able to keep up with the development across the emirate.

The power situation has considerably improved over the past few days as reported in today's newspaper