The city woke up to the sad news of two more persons — a father-daughter duo — falling prey to hanging power cables at Alwal in the wee hours of Saturday, after heavy rain battered the Western and Northern and Central parts through the night.

Added with the two casualties recorded on June 9, snapped power lines have consumed four lives in the city in the past four to five days.

The Telangana Southern Power Distribution Company Limited (TGSPDCL) issued a statement on Saturday saying that the cables belonged to streetlights, and that they snapped and fell onto the car along with the fallen tree branches.

TGSPDCL also issued an alert urging people to remain vigilant and report snapped wires and fallen poles to the discom’s call centre at 1912.

Streetlight poles, unlike electric supply poles, belong to the infrastructural network of the municipal authority concerned, and not to the discom.

Officials from the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) attributed the two deaths at Chandrayangutta to intense winds accompanied by heavy rainfall.

“The falling of the cable was an act of nature and entirely beyond the reasonable anticipation or control of the authorities concerned. No negligence, lapse in maintenance or administrative oversight contributed to this incident,” a senior official said.

He is only partially right though, say experts pointing to the absence of pre-monsoon maintenance as a reason behind the tragedies.

“There are two reasons,” said an official on condition of anonymity, “Either the relay at the substation was faulty or the insulators at the pole. Had these two parts been functioning as they should, these two accidents would not have occurred.”

Electrical relays at the substation are set to trip the power supply within milliseconds when a power conductor snaps, while the insulators on the power lines prevent electricity from escaping into poles.

“Even if an insulator is faulty, power would not flow into the concrete pole under dry weather conditions. But when it rains, the wet pole acts as a conductor, and pumps power back into the cable,” the official explained.

A thorough inspection of power and streetlight infrastructure before monsoons would have prevented the two incidents, and saved four lives, he said.

“Proper pruning of the tree branches as monsoon preparatory exercise could have prevented the latest incident,” he noted.

Chairman & Managing Director of the TGSPDCL, Jitesh V. Patil, clarified that the tripping mechanism is available only for high tension lines. The conductors involved are service wires of the streetlights, which draw power from distribution transformers.

“These two incidents are a lesson for us to introduce the tripping mechanism to the LT lines too,” he said, adding that tree trimming, which should have been taken up during summer, got delayed due to extreme heatwave this time, as it involves power shut down.