Storm Leaves Lanka to Cholapur Dark as Lines and Transformers Fail

Saturday’s wind and rain snapped wires, blew jumper links off poles and tripped transformer drop-out fuses across Varanasi, leaving pockets from Lanka, Sundarpur and Manduadih to Lohta, Lahartara, Cantt, Shivpur, Pandeypur, Sarnath and Cholapur without supply for hours while crews struggled through waterlogging.

Fault patterns were familiar to the line staff who walked the wet stretches. Branches rested on overhead conductors. Jumpers came off poles in the gusts. Transformer drop-out fuses blew and stayed open until a team could reach the pole in rain. In several belts the outage ran from Saturday evening into the night; in others supply failed earlier in the day and stayed off through the afternoon clear.

Named pockets in the wrap the desk is following include Lanka, Sundarpur, Manduadih, Lohta, Lahartara, Cantt and the Cantonment Board area, Shivpur, Harhua, Tarna, Pandeypur, Bela Road, Ashok Vihar Colony, Ashapur, Sarnath, Chiraigaon, Chaubepur, Jalhupur and Cholapur. That list mixes dense city lanes with outer belts and is not a claim that every house on every street went dark at once. It is the geography of reported faults and crew movements on Saturday.

Repair lagged behind the first trips because rain and waterlogging slowed truck access and made live-line work unsafe. Teams patrolled after the weather eased, re-tying jumpers, clearing branches off conductors and resetting blown drop-outs. A morning note from the same wet spell recorded that Nadesar and some other areas got power back after about 9 am, only for water supply to fail when pumps stayed dry or lines to the pumping points stayed weak; residents turned to handpumps until municipal and power desks caught up.

This city-and-belt wrap is distinct from the Friday Mirzamurad–Rohania rural outage brief and from the Cholapur–Jagdishpur single-pole storm story already on the site. Saturday’s geography is wider: Lanka and Manduadih on the university side, Cantt and Shivpur toward the station belt, Sarnath and Cholapur on the northern and outer approaches. Tree falls at Havelia, Chandmari and Rohania the same morning fed the same wire-and-transformer load and are covered separately.

No official duration tally for every pocket is on the record used here, and the desk is not inventing one. Hours-long outages and overnight dark stretches are what residents and line staff described across the named belts. Readers still without supply on Sunday morning should treat the local complaint desk and the feeder map as the live source, not this wrap.

The East UP IMD Heavy to Extremely Heavy language and the Babatpur METARs with midday gusts sit behind the same Saturday storm. Utility work in that weather is slow by design. Until the last blown drop-out is reset and the last branch is clear of the conductor, pockets on the list above can flicker even after the rain stops.