POWER CRISIS IMPACT
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To her horror, she woke up in the chilly Kathmandu morning to find all six fish floating dead in the cold water. “I found out that we had a power cut from 2 a.m. till 8 a.m. that night according to the new schedule of load-shedding and they probably died of cold,” she told this scribe at the center on Monday. [break]
Sujan Bajracharya of Patan also lost six-seven pairs of fishes in the past few days and having kept fishes for a couple of years feels confident to attribute their death to the deadly combination of frigid nights and long power cuts.
Life has become miserable for people in the new dark age that Nepal has been pushed into and they are making harsh adjustments to adapt to the new lifestyle. But the poor fishes are finding it difficult to live to fight another day.
A typical aquarium has a light, airpump, filter and heater, during the chilly winter, running on electricity and long extended hours of power cuts, especially during the nights, can prove fatal to the tiny fishes.
“We have to maintain temperature of 22-30 degree Celsius for most of the fishes and apart from goldfish, most of them die if the water temperature falls below 10,” says Raju Shrestha who has been running the RR Aquarium House at Battisputali for the last 17-18 years.
Keeping fishes is considered an affluent´s indulgence and almost all of the aquarium owners have power back-ups at home. But most of them don’t connect their aquariums to their inverters though a common 60-80-liter aquarium only uses about 60 watts of electricity.
Popular singer Ram Krishna Dhakal is well known among the fish aficionados and keeps a very large aquarium at his new posh residence in Hattigaunda but even he has not made alternative power arrangements for his aquarium.
“I have not connected my aquarium to the inverter,” admits Dhakal. And he has paid price for this. “Two of my parrotfish (considered one of the most expensive among the fishes available in Kathmandu) died a couple of days ago and I am sure they died due to load-shedding,” Dhakal, whose collection of parrotfish and sharks are more vulnerable to cold, adds.
Experts, however, feel that it is not all gloom for fish lovers in Kathmandu at present. “We normally give heaters to customers to maintain about 25 degree Celsius. In the present context of extended power cuts we have started to give them a little powerful heater targeting 30 degree so that the water temperature does not fall to the fatal level in six hours,” says Bhim Tandukar of Kathmandu Aquarium and Plants Center, Lainchaur.
He also says that one can observe the reading of the aquarium’s thermometer and add a couple of liters of warm water if the temperature falls to danger level. But doing so during the nights does take some dedication.
Raju Shrestha feels that one can also make other adjustments like keeping less than optimal number of fishes in aquariums to reduce risks but predicts bleaker times ahead if the government goes on to increase load-shedding.
“It will be very difficult to maintain temperature for eight hours during nights in winter,” Shrestha predicts.
Going by the difficulty people are facing to recharge their inverter batteries even at present, connecting the aquariums to the inverters will no longer remain an option.
Spring cannot come sooner for the valley fishes.
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