Power outages throughout the Roodepoort area have been keeping City Power technicians busy today, 18 January.
The first power outage reports came when residents of Florida Lake and surrounds noticed that their electricity did not turn on after the scheduled load-shedding last night. City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena, stated that cables had been stolen from the Florida Mechanical Workshop Feeder while load-shedding was being implemented. Cable theft also caused damage to the Florida/ Sentraal feeder, which would ultimately halt repairs even further.
These cable thefts caused a loss of power to:
• Florida Lake
• Florida Glen
• Hamberg
• Georgina South
• Bergbron and surrounding areas
For safety reasons, City Power technicians could only begin work on the repairs and replacing the cables once the day’s load-shedding had ended at 12.30pm. An estimated time of restoration (ETR) for this outage has not yet been communicated by the power entity.
In a completely separate incident, another explosion at the Nursery Substation shortly after 2pm added to the Florida power issues. “City Power is currently experiencing an unplanned power interruption at Nursery Substation due to a fault that occurred on current transformer equipment,” read the City Power statement. According to the entity, technicians were dispatched immediately after the incident occurred and have been working on repairs since, but are unable to provide an ETR.
The issues at the Nursery Substation have lead to a loss of power for:
• Florida CBD
• Florida Park and surrounding areas
To add to the list of City Power queries in Roodepoort, a few Witpoortjie residents have said that their electricity also did not turn on when load-shedding finished. It is not yet clear why this happened or when the issue will be resolved, but City Power has responded to reports of the outage by saying that it is one of several that they are aware of, and the next available team of technicians would be sent to the area to investigate the cause.
City Power provides updates on all outages through their Twitter page (@CityPowerJhb).
