Angry residents briefly barricaded Plane Road in Spartan at the electricity department’s building on Wednesday morning, demanding to speak to a chief engineer about the four-day long power outage in several Kempton Park suburbs.
The road had since been re-opened.
Residents were angry that the metro police arrived with a ‘big gun’. They said it was intimidation, as they were not violent or armed.
In the meantime, The City of Ekurhuleni has tweeted that testing of equipment is in progress. Once all is clear, power will be restored in stages. This is estimated to be late Wednesday afternoon.
According to Mark Wilson, department HOD, the outage was caused when the Glen Marais substation caught fire due to a circuit breaker explosion in the early hours of Saturday morning.
“This was due to cable theft. One of the cables going from the substation runs down a wetland. Unfortunately the breaker did not clear the fault and that resulted in the explosion, which set fire to the entire 25-panel switchboard.
“One thing Ekurhuleni does not have a problem with is in terms of skills and funding for maintenance. We have two major problems at the moment. One is cable theft, which we are going to try and combat with new technology in the next couple of months. The other major issue is with third-party contractors doing our cables,” Wilson said.
“So yes, you could be in a problem area but over the greater Ekurhuleni our performance is generally above average in terms of power failures.”
POWER UPDATE: KEMPTON PARK - Testing of equipment in progress. Once all is clear power will be restored in stages. This is estimated to be later this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/ozT4C7dyXU
— CITY OF EKURHULENI (@City_Ekurhuleni) June 12, 2019
Refiloe Nt’sekhe, MPL, and DA national spokesperson, on Wednesday morning said an official at the City of Ekurhuleni said the cause was cable theft. “However, I have been reliably informed that this explosion occurred mainly due to a lack of maintenance.
“This is unacceptable as businesses which are operating in an already constrained economy are now not able to open their doors and are losing revenue. Part-time staff at various retailers were told not to come in to work until the power is restored,” she said.
“In the City of Joburg, Roodepoort was without power and DA Mayor Herman Mashaba rented a mobile substation (generator) from Rustenburg to provide the area with power. I have called Mayor Mzwandile Masina to ask for the same intervention, but I’m yet to receive a response from him.”
