The 35-minute power failure which brought a city to a standstill
Little did they know what was coming
Rolling blackouts, or load shedding as Eskom prefers to call these regular planned power outages, first hit South Africa in 2008.
Many of us scrambled to buy generators to cope with the situation. And then in went away and generators were silent again – until late last year when the power crisis again reared its ugly, dark head.
And this time round we seem to be stuck with it for another five years.
Express came across a newspaper clipping from Die Transvaler, an Afrikaans newspaper which existed many years ago. It has not been around for many years now.
One cannot read the year in which this edition was published but it was in October. One of the stories on the front page is about a 35-minute power outage which brought a whole city to a standstill. Wow!
Little did they know at that time, many decades ago, what South Africa was in for. Not in their wildest dreams would they have imagined that a 35-minute power failure would escalate to what citizens have to deal with today.
