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Mohamad Dahman is trying to repair the damage caused by the fighting, precariously perched 50 meters from an electricity pylon feeding the Libyan capital. It descends however hastily when a rocket explodes nearby.
"We are used to working under shelling," he says.
"Our repair teams are running big risks since 2011," the year of the uprising of dictator Moamer Gaddafi, overthrown and supported by NATO, plunging the country into a deadly chaos of several years.
On the road that leads to Tripoli International Airport, long disused, fighting has been raging since early April, when the man strong military based in East Khalifa Haftar launched an badault for his Seize the capital of the Libyan union government.
The only traffic on the road today is tanks and armored vehicles. Most of the inhabitants fled.
High voltage cables run along the road for 30 km, carrying electricity to the capital, but they are regularly damaged by the fighting.
Despite the heat, Ramadan is fast and "dangerous to suffer random rockets," added Dahman, who kept coming back to fix them.
"Hope we can simplify things by reducing power outages."
Later, while they were repairing another pylon, he and his team came under heavy fire and had to leave the scene in a hurry.
& # 39; Huge damage & # 39;
Mohamad Abdallah, head of human resources at the Libyan National Electricity General Corporation (Gecol), said that repairing a damaged transmission tower could take up to 48 hours.
"The fighting means we can not finish the operations" on the many pylons to repair, he says.
Libya has been facing chronic power shortages since 2011, especially in winter and in extreme heat.
The offer is rationed, with average cuts of more than ten hours a day during the summer season, when air conditioning is essential.
For the moment, the weather is mild.
But power outages could worsen during the summer heat in the desert, exacerbated by the damage caused by fighting between the so-called Libyan National Army of Haftar and armed groups apparently loyal to the government. Union based in Tripoli.
Ayad al-Geneidi, executive director of Gecol, told AFP that the network had suffered "tremendous damage" during the fighting.
"They touched all parts of the network, from cables to pylons to distribution stations," he told his office near the airport highway.
He explains that some facilities have been completely destroyed, especially in areas near the airport where fierce fighting has taken place.
"It goes on like this – every day, there are new attacks," he says.
Even before the start of Haftar's offensive, Gecol had estimated that fighting and looting since 2011 had caused more than a billion dollars of damage to his network.
"We expect a deficit of 1,000 megawatts in the middle of the summer," said Geneidi, estimating that the network could produce about 6,000 megawatts, provided that it is not further damaged.
The latest fighting has also forced two European companies based in a power plant located west of Tripoli, an Italian and an Austrian, to end their operations and evacuate their staff.
Other companies from South Korea, Turkey and Germany had to suspend their plans to build new power plants under contracts signed before the 2011 uprising.
The reluctance of foreign companies to return to this volatile country means that they depend on their neighbors, Algeria and Tunisia, for electricity.
"We are counting on the national spirit of Libyans to help us by reducing their electricity consumption during peak summer hours," said Geneidi.
But as another scorching summer approaches, many people will find it hard to resist the temptation to turn the air conditioning on when the power goes on.
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