Durban - The KwaDukuza Municipality is to restore power after prolonged power outages in many parts of the municipality yesterday.
In a statement, the municipality’s spokesperson Sipho Mkhize offered his apologies to the communities of Salt Rock and surrounding areas for the prolonged power outages that were experienced since Wednesday.
Mkhize said this was a result of cable faults that were found on the 33kV cable linking the Shakaskraal Substation to the Sheffield Substation. The faults on the 33kV cable were located on Wednesday night.
Mkhize explained that the protection system could not isolate or trip for only the faulted part of the network because of the damaged direct current system batteries that are used for network protection at the municipality’s Shakaskraal Substation.
He said another issue was that the 33kV cables that supply the Sheffield Substation run through heavy bushes, and the locality of electric fences makes it very difficult to locate faults, including using the machines that were available to the municipality.
“The municipality’s technical team is on the ground working to restore power. The team is adamant that power will be restored during the course of today (Thursday). This follows an extensive overnight fault-finding quest and having to clear bushes and debris along the cable path to fix some of the cable faults.
“The power outages experienced in recent days will be part of the municipality’s dossier to Eskom in its quest to have substations temporarily exempt from load shedding until new substations are commissioned. The municipality apologises fundamentally for the inconvenience,” Mkhize said.