Power outage hits most parts of Kenya, restoration underway

Nairobi: Electricity supply in most parts of Kenya was Tuesday interrupted and businesses had to resort to using generators as the sole electricity distributor worked to restore the supply.

Kenya power said that the partial outage was caused by a fault at Gitaru hydro station at 11.30am and it was working to get operations back to normal.

“Power has now been restored in most areas including most Coast Region, West Kenya, North and South Rift and Nairobi South,” Kenya Power tweeted at 2.35pm.

The electricity distributor, however, said that restoration work for parts of Nairobi, Mt. Kenya and Coast was still ongoing. 

This is not the first time the country is experiencing a countrywide power outage; a similar situation occurred last year and businesses that did not have a backup plan were left counting losses.

Isolated cases of blackouts occur quite often in various parts of the country. In March this year, the Coast region was hit by blackout for over 12 hours due to a technical hitch that occurred at Kiambere Damal terminal, affecting a high voltage transmission line linking Nairobi and coast.