Power Cuts Disrupt Press [Archives:2000/11/Front Page]

The past few days have been seeing the practice of the old new habit of repeated power outage in Sanaa’s City for reasons known only by those in charge of electricity power at the Ministry of Electricity.
Repeated power outage do not only impede the work at factories but transcend that to involve the media work, especially the press, causing confusion and chaos to this vital activity.
Any journalist can work and write his articles in the candle light, but modern technology has not yet developed candle-powered equipment and therefore printing machines and computers are run solely by electricity. Repeated power failure causes damage to electric equipment like fridges, TV sets and other household appliances, owned by citizens paying electricity bills on a regular basis.
Citizens complaints against the Ministry of Electricity have become countless but the latter does turn deaf ears and refer them to their drawers. What is worse is that the government is intending to raise prices of some commodities and services including electricity. More critical is the situation with press, especially when power outage occur at times the newspapers are preoccupied in issuing their editions due to be at the hands of readers early next day.
The Yemen Times newspaper was on Sunday morning a victim of power failure. All the members of its staff were very busy working on the next issue for Monday. At 10:00 a.m. on Sunday two workers from electricity authority used a ladder and climbed to the top of a nearby electricity pole, cut power cables and left the place without any prior notice, all of a sudden work inside the newspaper building came to a standstill. The newspaper administration made many contacts with the electricity authority informing the people there about the incident. The authority responded only about four hours later and the power was restored to the newspaper under the justification that cutting the power supply to the building was by mistake for another building was meant by that measure. So simple, just a mistake made by a worker, but one wonders why such mistakes are so often repeated, and when are they to stop?
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