A power outage hit The Pearl-Qatar Tuesday morning after road works on Al Shamal Road damaged a cable in the main network feeding the Island.

The Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) tweeted around 10.45pm that the cable repair was close to completion and it expected power to be restored within the next few hours.

Earlier, Kahramaa said in a press statement that the outage was triggered at 6.57am after the road work damaged a portion of the power network under the Al Kharaitiyat bridge.

Once the matter was reported, Kahramaa standby teams rushed to the site to resolve the matter. The affected part was located under the bridge, near Ikea, and work was under way in full swing to restore electricity supply to The Pearl-Qatar at the earliest, according to the statement.

Kahramaa worked along with United Development Company (UDC) - main developer of The Pearl-Qatar – to fix the problem.

The UDC management set up a crisis room immediately after the power failure to deal with the situation and make efforts to restore electricity to all the affected zones, particularly the residential and commercial precincts of the Island, the company said in a statement.

“The initial efforts resulted in co-ordination with Kahramaa, which took responsibility to see to it that a technical team was despatched to deal with the situation and work to restore power supply to The Pearl-Qatar,” the statement noted. “UDC is working with Kahramaa’s team round the clock to restore power supply in general to the Island and, in turn, restore The Pearl-Qatar back to a fully functional residential and retail destination.”

Since the start of the power outage, UDC provided 51 power generators, while Kahramaa gave a further 16 electric generators to aid in channelling emergency power to vital areas on the Island, such as the sewage plant and water pumping stations.

Streets on the Island were also powered by mobile generators from Kahramaa in co-ordination with The Pearl-Qatar administration.

Many residents of the Island expressed concern – through Twitter and other online channels - over the prolonged power outage and how it might affect water supply, food stocks, etc.

The corporation, on its part, apologised to those affected by the outage through its social media platforms and also provided regular updates on the situation. It also urged people to stay safe and follow practices such as unplugging appliances during the outage so as to prevent any damage when the power is restored.

In a Twitter post, Kahramaa said HE the Minister of Energy and Industry Dr Mohamed bin Saleh al-Sada and the corporation’s president, Essa bin Hilal al-Kuwari, were on site to follow up on the repair work.

Kahramaa receives customer queries round the clock via its call centre (991), website (km.qa), application for smartphones (www.km.com.qa/Pages/DownloadApp.aspx), Facebook (facebook.com/kahramaa) and Twitter (twitter.com/#!/kahramaa).

HE Dr al-Sada and al-Kuwari following up on the repair work on site near the Al Kharaitiyat bridge.