WITH the recent electricity outages that have had Greater Alberton areas affected leaving residents frustrated, the City of Ekurhuleni (CoE) municipality blames it on vandalism.
The divisional head of communication, Nhlanhla Cebekhulu, said they experienced a recent spike in substation vandalism and theft or what seemed like attempted theft of cables.
“Feeder cables between two primary substations were stolen over the weekend and this resulted in the Eskom feed at the Point of Delivery Substation to trip. Vandalism of electrical protection at the secondary substations causes upstream protection to operate. The result is an area outage,” he said.
He said the CoE staff worked tirelessly to attend to the outages, in repairing damage to electrical equipment and in restoring supply under difficult circumstances.
With the damages to equipment, the overall available power was reduced as all feeders could not operate as under normal conditions until they could do required repairs.
This resulted in delays in restoration time as they had to avoid overload trips by adding load gradually.
“One of our technicians, while attending to an outage, caught vandals red-handed in a secondary substation. One managed to flee but another was arrested with the assistance from a private security company.
“Although the efforts from our technician are commendable it could easily end tragically as these vandals are sometimes armed and dangerous,” said Cebekhulu.
He told the RECORD that the large area outages experienced over the past weekends were not due to planned maintenance.
“The City plans normal maintenance in such a way as to not disturb supply of electricity to our customers where possible.
“In some cases, interruption of supply is unavoidable to conduct routine maintenance but the department will notify affected customers in advance of any planned maintenance,” he concluded.
The City has appointed a security service provider that will assist with prevention and investigation of all forms of illegal activities for the electricity distribution network.
