Privileged residents in North Korea's showcase city of Pyongyang are being forced to walk up to 30 flights of stairs because elevators in their exclusive apartment buildings stop frequently. Power shortages are getting worse in the impoverished communist nation, South Korean intelligence officials say.
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A view of the N. Korean capital on March 24. Severe power shortages have forced VIPs with 30th-floor suites to use the stairs.
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Several 30-story buildings, such as Chongnyon Hotel and the Kwangbok Department Store, house North Korea's high-level officials and senior Party members. Their apartments on the uppermost floors provide favorable views of the city.
But in recent years the elite inhabitants of the higher-floor apartments have been suffering most from frequent suspension of elevators due to chronic electricity shortages, Seoul's intelligence officials said.
To make up for electricity shortage, many people use generators that are powered by pedaling a bicycle. Pedaling for one hour stores enough electricity to keep a lamp going overnight.
"Electricity is a real problem. They have only six hours a day," one South Korean official said. Ko Young-Koo, chief of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, told Seoul's National Assembly last week that North Korean power supplies supply only 45 percent of the country's needs.
The North's food shortages have slightly eased, but its acute energy crunch is getting worse, officials said. For example, Sinuiju, the North's major city bordering China, gets electricity for about 12 hours a day but only inconsistently. The dim nighttime view of Sinuiju stands in contrast with the brightly lit cityscape of Dandong, a Chinese border city, the officials said.
Nighttime spy satellite photos show all parts of North Korea, excepting Pyongyang, as nearly pitch black, compared with the South, which is aglow with shimmering constellations of light. "The blackouts even in Pyongyang reflect acute energy shortages in North Korea," the official said.
North Korea asked for energy aid worth 2 million kilowatts of electricity in return for freezing its nuclear programs during last year's six-nation talks on its nuclear programs.
South Korea has supplied electricity since March to the inter-Korean joint industrial complex in a North Korean border city of Kaesong.
