With some cities including Wonju, Gangwon Province, without power for more than 40 minutes Thursday, outages left telecommunications companies hoping their emergency generators could hold out.

The power cuts began to occur at 3:30 p.m. According to the Korea Electric Power Corp., the power plants were cut off after the outages and the plants were proceeding with rolling brownouts every 30 minutes.

Major companies were able to avoid outages by using power generating equipment, but other unprepared organizations were affected.

Telecommunication companies are in the process of preparing for their power generators being shut down.

“We have an electric condenser that can keep the system up to three hours. After the condenser runs out of power, we will be providing backup with truck generators,” the KT public relations department told The Korea Herald.

So far the company has not received any calls complaining about a connection loss. However, if the recovery process lasts longer than expected, it will be difficult to maintain its system by relying on power generators alone.

The last time when KT operated the power generating equipment was in late July, when there was heavy rainfall in the Gangnam area of southern Seoul. KT did not rule out the possibility of the maintenance process continuing.

“Three to four hours is not a big problem. But we worry that the volume of electricity we can generate through the equipment will not be enough to cover the whole nation,” the public relations department said.

KEPCO announced late Thursday afternoon that the situation would be restored to normal by 8:30 p.m.

The temperature for Friday afternoon was expected to be hotter than Thursday.

By Monica Suk (monicasuk@heraldcorp.com)