Q FM Africa's Modern Radio
Preliminary investigations have revealed that the system disturbance that led to the country being plunged in total darkness last night emanated from the Kitwe substation and later spread to Luano substation.
And ZESCO says over 1,500 megawatts of power was cut off from the national grid as a result of the system disturbance.
ZESCO Senior Manager Marketing and Public relations Bessie Banda has told a media briefing in Lusaka this afternoon that investigations have also revealed that prior to the system disturbance, the entire ZESCO grid was characterized by excessive high voltages due to the sudden drop in loads.
Ms. Banda has explained that this is what triggered the automatic switching off of the generators at Kariba North Bank and Kafue Gorge Power stations to safeguard and protect them from damage.
She says after the cutting off of 1,500 megawatts from the national grid, only 90 megawatts from Victoria Falls Power Station remained on the grid supplying power to Southern and Western provinces.
She adds that prior to the outage, the internal demand for electricity stood at 1,622 megawatts.
Ms. Banda states that ZESCO has however restored power to Muchinga, Eastern, Northern, Lusaka and Central provinces and that the power utility company is working at restoring power to the rest of the affected areas while investigation to establish the actual fault of the outage continue.
Meanwhile the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) was last evening sent into panic mode following power outage that hit almost the entire country.
UTH Managing Director Luckson Kasonka has told Qfm News that the hospital was badly affected by the power outage which affected the operations of the oxygen plant.
Dr. Kasonka says the hospital staff was forced to resort to using the oxygen cylinders to help the patients who needed the service.
He explains that the oxygen plant was affected by the power outage because it is not backed up by a generator.
Mr. Kasonka adds that the hospital was also made to use generators in some areas of service.
He states that as hospital management they have realized the need for more standby generators in case of a similar problem in future.