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Tricky oil-filled cable fault behind Kanonkop, Dennesig power outage

If its not load-shedding its cables...

Kanonkop and Dennesig residents will have to endure at least another eight hours without electricity after the municipality announced shortly after 05:00 this morning that the area is experiencing an equipment outage.

It has since been established that the high-pressure oil-filled cable supplying the area with electricity has lost pressure, and the cable needs to be refilled with oil.
The high-pressure oil-filled cable has caused problems before.

A few years ago, specialised teams had to be dispatched from Gauteng to repair the cable, which left Kanonkop and Dennesig residents without power for more than 48 hours.

The problem with the cable is that it is buried deep underground, resulting in many hours of searching for faults on the cable.

With the major outage a few years ago, the teams first had to establish where a leak in the cable had occurred, so that the leak could be patched before the cable could be refilled.

The oil also had to be shipped in following repairs, resulting in a longer outage than anticipated.

The municipality has not disclosed in its community bulletin whether specialised teams will have to be dispatched to fix the current problem on the oil-filled cable.

According to the information supplied, the oil needs to be topped up, which could take up to eight hours.

The area will be off again from 19:00 to 21:00 tonight due to load-shedding.

Meanwhile, a cable has also been snapped on the corner of Park and Jeppe Street, presumably by last night’s storm.

 

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Sjani Campher

Sjani has been working as a community journalist and photographer at the Middelburg Observer since 2018, during which she has been responsible for the content creation for both digital and print, as well as maintaining the publication's online platforms. She is a member of the Forum for Community Journalists, and focuses on fields including hard news, investigative reporting, human interest, columns and sports.
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