Fire engineering consultants have warned of the heightened risk of fires breaking out in sub-stations and transformers, amid higher stages of rolling blackouts. It comes as Eskom continues to impose Stage 6 power cut, which is anticipated to persist throughout the week.
ASP Fire’s CEO, Michael van Niekerk says, “Sub-stations consist of multiple pieces of electrical equipment, transformers are one of them and the switchgear is the other. So, you have fires in a transformer, which can be related to the failure of insulation or oil inside the transformer and the switch gear inside the substation that also fails. So, I think due to load shedding, the switch gear failure inside the sub-station is probably the higher cause of a fire or a failure.”
