Fatality due to contact with low-hanging electrical cable

The victim and a friend were on their way back from their daily hustle, when the man allegedly touched the live electrical line with his bush cutter that he uses to cut grass for a living.

He unfortunately sustained fatal injuries from the incident.

Two months earlier Eskom technicians responded to a theft at the Jetta substation which plunged the area into darkness, and restored supply.

With the current incident, which is about one kilometer from the sub-station, Eskom discovered that an auxiliary transformer had been stolen.

The theft or the subsequent outage was not reported to the public utility.

Theft of the network equipment is one of many criminal activities that cripple Eskom’s efforts to sustain services to its customers.

Such criminal acts, including illegal connections, network vandalism and unauthorised operation on the network, threaten the utility’s financial sustainability and impacts the economy negatively.

Eskom constantly conducts public safety awareness campaigns where members of the public are educated on the safe use of electricity and how members of the community need to conduct themselves around electricity infrastructure, including to safeguard the network.