Parts of the north were without electricity for 12 hours on Friday night and Saturday morning, with the suburb of Yenikent, in Kioneli, just outside Nicosia, the worst affected.

The outages occurred after a boiler exploded at the thermal power plant at Teknecik, near Kyrenia, leaving residents to swelter in the nighttime heat.

The north’s electricity authority Kib-Tek’s director Dalman Aydin had promised that the boiler had been repaired and that no power outages would occur as a result of the explosion, but Yenikent lost power on Friday afternoon, and was not reconnected until after sunrise on Saturday.

Yenikent mukhtar Melek Arabacioglu said in a social media post in the early hours of Saturday morning that teams from Kib-Tek had arrived in the area to begin excavation works on two sites, with the aim of finding a fault.

One of the areas was outside the Prego café in Yenikent, next to the motorway linking Nicosia with Morphou, and the other was in northern Nicosia’s industrial zone.

Local residents were less than impressed with the situation, with one social media user saying he would “make it rain eggs” on Kib-Tek’s central offices if power is not restored.

Others made use of their cars to charge their mobile phones, to have a source of light, and to have a means of air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat.

Opposition political party CTP leader Tufan Erhurman expressed his surprise and upset on Saturday morning, asking “what could be worse?”

“During the time the power was off, not a single Kib-Tek official or a single ‘government’ official bothered to make a statement on its cause or how long it would last. People were desperately waiting without knowing what would happen,” he said.