Residents of Florida, Florida Park, Floracliff, Discovery and Selwyn in Johannesburg are in for another day without electricity on Tuesday after a power outage on Sunday.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said: “Due to the storm we experienced severe damage at Nursery substation. Therefore we are unable to restore supply to the whole area. The substation's roof was blown off.”
Mangena expected power to be restored early on Wednesday “if all goes according to plan”.
Florida police station and two healthcare facilities, Life Flora hospital and Discovery clinic, have been operating on generator power since the outage.
“The damaged roof has been removed and material sourced to replace it. The 6.6kV feeder board repair will commence once the roof is in place to protect the equipment from the rain,” said Mangena. “Please make alternative arrangements for medical situations. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this outage.”
DA councillor Caleb Finn said four wards, 70, 84, 85 and 89, were affected by the outage.
Finn said the Nursery substation had suffered a “flash over” on Sunday. Technicians arrived and discovered that the roof had blown off, leaving the electrical equipment inside wet, which led to an explosion.
“The steel roof structure landed on some of the electrical equipment in the yard, causing further damage,” he explained.
He said that around 4pm another large storm hit, causing the substation to be flooded again. City Power had to halt repairs until a roof could be erected on Monday.
TimesLIVE visited the substation on Monday and two teams were removing the damaged roof that fell on to nearby electrical equipment. A contractor was erecting a new roof.
Jan Kleynhans, who runs an electrical shop in the affected area, uses a small generator he purchased when power outages started becoming a regular occurrence.
“This is terrible. How are we expected to survive when we experience power outages every week?” he asked.
He reported having lost more than 80% of his revenue to the coronavirus pandemic and power outages made things worse. “At this rate we are going to shut our doors.”
Charles Abigo, a barber, did not have a generator and had to close his shop.
“I might as well just close shop ... I can’t cut people’s hair nor do treatments,” Abigo said.
A photocopy shop and other small businesses were also closed.
DA ward 84 councillor Gert Niemand said only bigger restaurants and other shops with generators had opened.
“We are in a race against time. Many of these small shops will never be able to recover from this setback. We are not blaming anyone as this was caused by a storm, but I pray that City Power moves with speed,” Niemand said.
The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that decrepit infrastructure, illegal connections, vacancies in crucial engineering posts and underspending of the capital budget were some of the reasons behind scores of regular power cuts across Johannesburg.
According to City Power’s Twitter account, on Thursday there were up to 16 outages, mostly due to infrastructure failure.
Power cuts and illegal connections cost more than R400m in revenue annually, said city spokesperson Nthatisi Modingoane.
City Power's Mangena said more than 90% of the power interruptions were caused by cable theft, network overloading, illegal connections, third-party damage and vandalism of the electricity network.
City Power has partnered the Johannesburg Metro police and the city’s group forensic investigative service to monitor the network, and arrest and prosecute cable thieves.
