Power outage turns Durban residents off

A blackout which left large parts of Durban without power‚ the second in as many weeks‚ has been blamed on the Klaarwater power station.

The eThekwini Municipality on Twitter apologised for the outage‚ saying intermittent problems had arisen at the station.

“We are doing everything to have everyone reconnected to the grid. Siyaxolisa [apologies]‚” it wrote.

Affected areas include central Durban to parts of Westville.

An explosion and fire at an eThekwini Municipality electrical substation two weeks ago left vast expanses of the city from Umhlanga in the north to Hillcrest in the west‚ without electricity for several hours.

Photographs of charred electrical hardware‚ posted by the municipality on its Facebook page to quell viral fake news‚ inadvertently provided critical insight into the potential cause of the fire.

The explosion was not the first at the city-run Klaarwater major substation‚ with a 2016 blaze also plunging the city into darkness. Hospitals‚ business and other critical infrastructure relied on generator power for nearly three hours in a throwback to an era of load shedding.

Attempts to contact the city for a detailed breakdown of affected suburbs proved unsuccessful at the time of publishing.