Uganda experiences national power outage same time as Kenya
Uganda on Saturday morning experienced a national power blackout the same time as Kenya’s, which lasted more than seven hours in many parts of the county.
Confirming the power blackout, Uganda’s main electricity distribution company, Umeme Limited confirmed the outage in an alert on its social media pages.
“We have been advised by our supplier, Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Limited (UETCL) of a nationwide outage,” part of the Power outage alert read.
“The UETCL Team is working to have the power supply restored. We shall keep you updated on progress,” added the alert issued on Saturday morning.
The power company warned that it might resort to a three-day 9am – 5pm load shedding routine starting Sunday to allow for ‘water release tests.’
This comes barely a fortnight after Uganda’s Water and Environment Ministry revealed that Lake Victoria’s water levels had surged to their highest level in more than half a century posing a threat to the country’s hydropower plants.
On its part, Kenya Power said power supply was lost due to a system disturbance which occurred on its transmission network at 5.49am on Saturday.
“Our engineers are working to identify and address the hitch towards restoring normal electricity supply,” Kenya Power announced in a statement.
Both utility companies apologised for the inconvenience caused.
In January 2018, both countries suffered major blackouts due to what they said were system disturbances.