The City of Ekurhuleni has refuted claims by the DA that lack of maintenance, foreign-bought equipment and not using a mobile substation could have eased the impact of the seven-day long power outage in Kempton Park suburbs last month.
The claims were made by the DA’s Michael Waters, MP and Lethabong Constituency head.
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Metro spokesperson Themba Gadebe said in a statement on Thursday maintenance at the Glen Marais substation was done in May this year and equipment was not bought from Chinese suppliers but from a company in Midrand in the 2018/19 financial year.
The substation caught fire in the early hours of June 8, leaving many residents without power for a week.
Gadebe said the mobile substation could not be used as it was assisting in another area at the time of the outage. The mobile station was bought in 2008 at a cost of R3.4-million, excluding VAT.
It is being used to minimise the power outage impact to residents across the City of Ekurhuleni.
Waters wanted to know whether the City approached Eskom to rent additional mobile units, which the metro did not do.
“The City had the capacity for execution of the repair works. Supply was restored to customers as and when immediately possible. Power to Edleen, Terenure and Birch Acres was restored within the service delivery standard time period,” said Gadebe.
“Unfortunately, it took longer than anticipated to restore supply to all areas.”
Waters said the lack of routine maintenance at the Glen Marais substation and adjacent power lines prevented the metro from bypassing the substation and connecting residents to other sources of power, and that the metro failed to repair the Glen Marais/Van Riebeeck Park cable from July 31 last year.
These allegations were denied by the City. Gadebe said maintenance was done and that the cable Waters referred to was never damaged.
Therefore, Gadebe said, the statement that the City could have bypassed the Glen Marais substation and provided electricity from the Spartan substation, is false.
All areas that can be supplied power from Spartan substation had power. There were no outages in these areas that were a direct consequence of the Glen Marais substation incident. These include Spartan, Croydon, Esther Park and Cresslawn.
The City also denied that the Glen Marais substation could not be switched off during recent load-shedding as the risk was too high due to poor maintenance.
