Johannesburg – Some parts of Joburg were plunged into darkness over the past few days after the weekend’s violent storm uprooted trees that fell on power lines and affected some substations.
The damage to the electricity infrastructure was so severe that the City’s MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services Department Mpho Moerane evaluated it on Tuesday.
He started at the Nursery substation in Roodepoort to monitor the repairs after the substation’s roof was blown off on Saturday night.
"The damage was so severe, affecting the infrastructure’s feederboard, and we couldn't even backfeed. The outage affected residents of Florida, Floracliff, Discovery, and Selwyn," Moerane said.
The Pennyville substation was also without power after a switchgear was blown off.
The Eagle Canon area had a cable fault.
On Tuesday morning, City Power was dealing with 3 730 calls to report outages, with most of these from Roodepoort, Lenasia, and Hursthill area.
“In Hursthill, there's a lot of outages because of uprooted trees that fell on the aerial line due to the adverse weather conditions. Work to rebuild those lines and poles is ongoing. We are working with City Parks to assist in cutting off and removing the fallen trees.
“The same was recorded even in some areas around Lenasia, where overhead line poles were uprooted by the storm.
“The Siemert Road depot was also attending to damaged lines, which had affected the suburbs of Bellevue, Berea, Betrams and Bruma. This has resulted in multiple cable faults, which are being attended to.
“Some of of the outages were attended to and power. In some cases, however, contractors and technicians are still working hard to rebuild the infrastructure power is restored.
“We appeal to the residents for patience and co-operation as the teams work on the backlog. We also want to assure the residents that there is no crisis with regard to the labour contracts,” he said.
“With the lights off, we are also aware that criminals see an opportunity to vandalise and steal the infrastructure. We appeal to the residents to be vigilant and report any suspicious activities around electricity infrastructure.”
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