Where were you when the lights went off in Egypt ?

First of all I have got an announcement to make , my laptop is technically dead and I am searching for a new one now so there will be less posts in the blog for the time being till I buy a new one. I am currently using my ipad for blogging and actually it is a hard thing to maintain a blog through your tablet. "Blogger app is still behind wordpress app as expected :/ " 

Anyhow I should stop complaining when we got bigger issues in the country , I mean since early morning Egypt reached the peak of power outage this summer with our grand nationwide power outage that started from 6.30 am Thursday morning in Cairo and spread all over the country. The power outage affected Cairo , Giza , Suez, Alexandria and various parts of delta and nearly 5 governorates in North Upper Egypt. 

I woke up this morning to find I got no water and later no electricty. Yes many people suffered from water cuts as well because water supply stations in Cairo and Giza needed power and it took hours before they were re-operated by additional diesel fueled generators. 

Of course many houses have got no water up till now because they got roof water supply storage which is operated by electricty . Yes up till that late hours many Egyptians in Cairo and outside it suffer from constant power outages after the major morning power outage. 

The economic losses of the day are far more than anyone estimated for real. The financial losses in Suez where we got Red Sea ports as well Suez Canal itself and heavy industries factories like steel have reportedly reached to one billion Egyptian pound !! Yes one billion and this is one small governorate, imagine Cairo and Giza. 

Already today while in work I tried to order food from two restaurants, both suffered from power outages for hours. Not all the shops and restaurants have bought emergency power generators or even can afford or find diesel easily.

Of course financial losses can not be compared to the human losses, people were scared on the patients in the ICU in public hospitals as well babies in neonatal units. 

The only bright side in that dark outage was that the power was cut for some hours at Egypt's media production city and some TV channels from those spreading hate and lies all the past months were off the air for couple of hours. 

It is unprecedented nationwide outage. We have not seen something since 1990 despite all the outages we suffer from through out the the summer season in the past 5 years. 

For  the record the minister of electricty Ahmed Shaker apologized to the Egyptian people for the power outage , a thing that is considered rare in our Egyptian governmental culture. Shaker announced today that Egypt's electricty production went from 20,000 megawatts to 10,000 megawatts !!! Yes by the half suddenly. 

Needless to say there was technical talk about what caused that huge outage. At first some officials were speaking about what they called " a maneuver" to shift loads that went wrong !! Then hours later they began to speak about some technical malfunction. 

Of course the Pro-ElSisi supporters claim as usual that that devious plan made by the Muslim Brotherhood agents in the ministry of electricty despite the ministry of electricty officials and electric companies "following the state" across the state made it clear that preliminary investigations showed that it was a technical malfunction and not a terrorist attack.

From what I read and understood that outage was going to happen sooner or later. The outage problem in Egypt is not caused only by lack of fuel or high electricty consumption I am afraid but mainly because our electric grid and Electricty power stations are extremely old and need to be upgraded. Those old stations can not take it anymore just like the rest of the infrastructure in Egypt. 

Already before we speak and invest billions in mega-projects , why we should invest first in upgrading our infrastructure.Already I know mega-projects need a strong infrastructure in the first place !?!!