Despite a record rainfall and prolonged monsoon season this year, K-Electric successfully ensured zero public safety incidents associated with its system.
This achievement of KE came to light and remained the central point of discussion during an insightful webinar ‘Transmission & Distribution Network Protection’ organized by NEPRA.
Focused on safety of transmission and distribution networks, the session was commenced by Chairman NEPRA – Mr. Tauseef H. Farooqi who gave opening remarks and welcomed all the participants as well as speakers on behalf of the Authority.
He said that this webinar was happening under NEPRA’s ‘Power with Safety’ initiative and was glad to see that progress was being made on HSE front.
After the opening remarks, Chief Distribution Officer at K-Electric – Mr. Amer Zia was invited to shed light on safety culture in KE. Mr. Amer Zia started his address by thanking the Authority and Chairman NEPRA for organizing this crucial session which could cascade important learnings pertaining to safety among industry peers.
He said “Due to changing weather conditions accelerated by climate change, Karachi has started to experience heavy rainfall since past few years that led to unfortunate electrocution incidents in the past.
Understanding the challenge, K-Electric under the guidance of NEPRA Authority, continued to learn from past experiences and uplifted its safety procedure through targeted investments. So far, K-Electric has ensured grounding of its electric poles along with their GIS tagging.
Apart from this primary layer of protection, we are installing running earth wire on these poles done as a secondary layer as well i.e. ‘’protective earth’’ which would make sure the operation of protective devices effectively to prevent human body from leakage current.
As a tertiary protection, all our overhead 11kV lines are double earth guard-wired and in case a wire breaks down, the system within the affected spans will get instantly tripped and the masses would remain safe from any unforeseen incident.”