The heat, a kite, laundry? Fatemah Farag braves soaring temperatures in search of the reasons behind Cairo's power cuts Click to view image As the heat wave originating in south-east Asia continued, pushing temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius, Greater Cairo's electricity lines broke down again, then again and again. Cairenes, suffering the compounded effects of high temperatures, humidity and pollution, could hardly be expected to welcome the Weather Authority's candid announcement that the heat wave which has pushed temperatures nine degrees above the monthly average shows no signs of ending. The Ministry of Health has warned citizens against sun stroke, advising that they avoid direct sunlight, crowded areas, badly- ventilated rooms and food prepared outside their homes. But it might all have been tolerable if not for the power cuts. The longest and most damaging outage occurred on 18 July. Not only were air-conditioners and fans silenced, the capital's water pumping stations were brought to a halt and computers at EgyptTel reportedly damaged. Thousands, trapped in the subway line beneath the Nile, had to walk for a kilometre in pitch dark to the nearest station after workers had prised open the doors of the train manually. And while the capital has not suffered such a massive loss of power since, smaller electricity cuts continue to plague the city. The Ministry of Electricity blamed Thursday's outage, and many of the smaller cuts that have followed, on a breakdown in one of the high voltage transmission station lines that traverse Basous, an area of informal housing in the working-class district of Shubra Al-Kheima. Speaking to the press following the 18 July blackout the Ministry of Electricity's spokesman, Hassan Foda, suggested that the breakdown of the line might have been caused by "people putting their laundry out to dry on the high voltage pylons". Not so, according to the committee of ministry specialists formed to investigate. The culprit was a kite, made of aluminum and flown by a child, which accidentally became tangled in the cables above the informal housing of Basous. None of which has impressed the inhabitants of the simple two to three-storey brick houses. Standing beneath one of the towering pylons Mohamed Ahmed, a house painter who has lived in Basous for the past 18 years, scoffed: "A child's kite could hardly affect these cables -- not unless they were faulty to start with." The people of Basous have not yet met with any ministry officials. "We would like someone to come and talk to us," says Mustafa Mohamed, owner of a coffee shop two-minutes drive away from the power station the pylons serve. "Then we could tell them that while they are so upset about a few hours of outage we suffer power cuts all the time, every day. We have no sewage, no potable water and no schools for our children." Ironically the one service -- if erratic -- the people of Basous do have is electricity. Most households appear to have lines installed by the Electricity Company and those interviewed by the Weekly reported regular monthly bills that range between LE4-LE20. Their indignation, for once, is shared by their governor, Adli Hussein Hafez. In an open letter to Al-Ahram published on 21 July, Qalyubiya's governor pointed out that "upon visiting the area it was found to be a congested district with houses, some built 20 years ago, standing beneath the high intensity power lines. The Electricity Company, without obtaining the permission of the local council, extended electricity years ago to homes the location of which violates the law. We estimate the number of these [homes] at 30,000. It was obvious to us that many of the cables are too close to the tops of the houses, which is dangerous for both the inhabitants and the cables." While the minister of electricity, Hassan Younis, assured the public that electricity would continue to be extended to Greater Cairo's informal housing areas within the framework of the national plan to upgrade shanty towns, he also confirmed that the government would not allow any new structures to be built beneath or near high to medium intensity cables. No mention, though, was made of those that already exist. As the governor of Qalyubiya pointed out, moving either the cables, or the inhabitants, would be a multi-million pound project. And as far as Basous's house painter Ahmed is concerned, "we will not leave even if they shoot us because we have nowhere else to go." As the power cuts and heat wave continued, the scepticism the inhabitants of Basous felt towards the ministry's findings spread. Other explanations began to surface, not least the massive increase in consumption that the heat wave has brought. In Cairo alone demand for electricity has, in recent weeks, increased by 1,000 mega watts, and the Electricity Company has been placed on "maximum emergency" footing. And in a statement last week the company conceded that a great deal of damage was caused to the system by the faulty installation of air-conditioners. Since the beginning of the heat wave a daily average of 80 homes have had circuits blown because of incorrect wiring. Since the mid-1980s, and following a hundreds-of-million- dollar upgrade of the national grid, cuts like last week's have been rare. Yet with the growth in numbers of subscribers, up to 18 million nationwide, and the increase in the use of high- consumption gadgets, further investment in the national grid is becoming urgent. Only last May the Greater Cairo Company for Distributing Electricity allocated LE112 million to upgrade services to Cairo's 5.7 million subscribers. Without further investment the national grid looks perilously close to melt down. And in the meantime a little kite flyer, probably a very hot little kite flyer, remains at large.
