While many South Africans are relieved there won’t be any load shedding this weekend, some are still without power. Suburbs in several areas around Johannesburg have been affected by mini-substation explosions caused by the current in-surge during load shedding.
City Power technicians are attending to multiple faults around Blairgowrie. The whole area below is affected. We do not have ETR. pic.twitter.com/aenft5LCTX
— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) February 16, 2019
Vandalised mini substation replaced in Goudrand, Roodepoort. Power restored.
Apologies to the residents in the area. pic.twitter.com/SqP3flgjZg— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) February 16, 2019
Thieves also took advantage of the power outage, stealing cables around the city. City Power has deployed technicians to different substations and urged people to continue reporting any power outages in their areas.
Spokesperson for City Power, Isaac Mangena, says they are currently assessing the cost of the damage.
“City Power has been experiencing an increase in calls from residents who want to report faults and outages in the City of Johannesburg following the rotational load shedding period this week. The load shedding had serious effects on our systems that work. During the load shedding, City Power experienced serious loss due to among others cables that were stolen by thieves who were taking advantage of the systems being off and we will obviously do an investigation as to determine how much it will cost City Power, but I am sure it goes into millions.”
