SPOT THE STAR: The 32K gallery wore a star-starved look on Wednesday with a no-show from Shah Rukh Khan and his friends. It was left to Bollywood B-lister Sameera Reddy to keep the KKR flag flying. (Pabitra Das)

If you wanted to escape the power-cut darkness engulfing Calcutta on Wednesday, the best bet was being at the floodlit Eden Gardens, powered by giant generators, and cheering the Knight Riders to a win.

But only after 6.18pm.

A note, purportedly circulated by the CAB, blamed a pre-match dark spell on CESC: “It is really unfortunate that in spite of dedicated line, Electrical Power from CESC at 4 Nos. Floodlight Towers and Under Galleries of Eden Gardens was not available from 5.28pm to 6.18pm on date despite of scheduled IPL Match.”

The error-filled note, reproduced above, may have cried out for a mind-your-language rap but it did manage to get the CAB’s point across: that CESC had slipped up at Eden, though this time well before the first ball was bowled.

CESC blamed the power supply lapse at the stadium not on the current demand-supply crisis but on a transformer fire in the central business district, which resulted in a power outage at several key establishments in the area for over half an hour.

“There was a transformer fire on Pollock Street for which the system tripped temporarily. Several key establishments in the central business district, including the Eden Gardens and parts of Writers’ Buildings went without power,” said a CESC spokesperson.

The towers apart, there was no CESC supply to the D-block till 6.18pm. “That is a low-tension supply used to run different pumps including the one that fills up the tanks above the galleries,” said a CAB official.

What kept Eden aglow in the dark on Thursday was the battery of diesel generators working overtime beneath the four towers from 5.30pm.

Alarmed at the city’s power situation, the CAB had rolled in eight giant diesel gen-sets by afternoon, pressing into action a body of electrical engineers from both its stable as well as from Siemens.

“We started the sets around 5.30pm, barely two minutes after CESC’s dedicated line to the four towers tripped,” said Sadhan Mukherjee, the CAB expert on tower lighting. “If we had relied on CESC’s feed, it would not have been possible to light up the towers before 7pm even though the police had thrown open the gates from 6pm.”

Guzzling around 80 litres of diesel per hour, the four generator sets have been hired from a Hyderabad-based agency for Rs 43 lakh, excluding fuel cost.

Collectively, the generators drummed up 4000KVA of power on Wednesday. With each of the sets connected to the towers, engineers said, the problem of voltage fluctuation at Eden owing to power surges was completely eliminated and uninterrupted power supply assured.

A senior engineer added: “The gen-sets also ensured that the quality of power feed to all the 864 lamps across the four towers was consistently very good.”

Something that could also be said of KKR’s bowling and fielding. “The Eden lights going off for a bit is lucky for the home team,” smiled a Sourav Ganguly devotee who had entered Eden at 6.10pm.

Like most Eden veterans, he had got his facts right — on April 20, 2008, a 31-minute blackout later, KKR had beaten the Deccan Chargers; on December 24, 2009 India had beaten Sri Lanka after a 26-minute blackout.