Patna Power Grid Disaster Leaves 10 Lakh Without Electricity for 19 Hours Amid Sweltering Heatwave

Jun, 13 2025

19 Hours in the Dark: Patna’s Power Grid Fails During Heatwave

No one in Patna saw it coming. On June 11th, just after 10:30 PM, a gas leak in the Karbighiya grid sparked an explosion at the city’s relatively new New GIS Mithapur Grid. As fire and alarms rattled neighborhoods, the electricity supply to huge swathes of Patna’s heart—Kankarbagh, Bypass, Rajendra Nagar, Mithapur, Beur, and Karbighiya—vanished. More than 10 lakh residents found themselves suddenly stuck in a punishing 19-hour blackout right as the city baked under a brutal heatwave.

The sheer scale was staggering. Seventeen substations that fed these vital areas went offline in moments. Living rooms sweltered, and ceiling fans froze mid-spin. For anyone with young kids or elderly parents, the timing was extra painful—thermometers outside kept climbing, but inside, finding relief was hopeless.

Daily routines derailed almost instantly. Without power, electric pumps that supply water to apartment complexes and homes simply gave up. If you’d missed filling up buckets the previous day, tough luck—the taps ran dry all morning and into the next afternoon. It wasn’t just about missing cold showers or functioning fridges; residents like Swati Kumari in Kankarbagh described the chaos as ‘ignorant’ and bordering on neglect, especially as people’s health risks rose with each sweating hour.

Only erratic power blips surfaced from backups—10 to 30 minutes of supply scattered every couple hours.
Alternative grids, including Gaighat and Jakkanpur, were tapped to stagger electricity, but it was rarely enough to run more than emergency lights and, sometimes, a single fan.
Even water tankers struggled, as traffic signals and communication lines flickered off in much of the city.

Critical infrastructure faced its own scramble. Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH), a lifeline for emergencies, got power rerouted from the Digha grid—another desperate patch to keep intensive care units operating. But for schools, shops, and the thousands working from home, it was mostly radio silence—a city-wide pause forced by one unexpected spark.

Why Did the ‘Modern’ GIS Grid Collapse?

This wasn’t supposed to happen—not with Patna’s underground GIS (Gas Insulated Switchgear) grid system, which the authorities introduced to make blackouts a thing of the past. But when the gas leak and explosion struck, few were prepared for such cascading failure. Shriram Singh, General Manager of Patna Electric Supply Undertaking (PESU), acknowledged that the real root was the leak and resulting explosion, which forced engineers to reevaluate every assumption about the grid’s safety.

What made restoration so tricky? Engineers had to resort to manual rewiring deep inside substations, working by headlights and in suffocating electrical rooms. Each attempt at bringing power from alternative lines temporarily helped some pockets, but never the whole grid. Full restoration wasn’t declared until 5:30 PM on June 12th—19 hours after most homes first lost light.

Residents’ frustration boiled over on social media and in neighborhood gatherings. “We had to go without water, without fans, without sleep—while outside, the temperature wouldn’t drop below 38°C,” said Abhishek Ranjan from Mithapur. Many wondered how such a large stretch of the city could have a single point of failure.

The blackout marks the first large-scale collapse of Patna’s underground GIS network.
City engineers have launched an urgent probe to find out why the leak happened and how an explosion at one spot could cripple so much of central Patna.

What’s clear is that the blackout wasn’t just an inconvenience—it exposed how fragile some parts of Patna’s supposedly advanced grid remain, especially as demand climbs with each new wave of heat.