Staff work around the clock to restore power

ELECTRICITY supply has been restored to all areas of the City that were affected by power outages caused by the heat-wave over the Christmas weekend.

A number of areas within eThekwini Municipality were left without electricity following the excessive heat on Christmas Day, which caused medium voltage cable terminations to fail at various substations, disrupting power supply to many areas in the City. Temperature levels that were in excess of 42 degrees were reported in some areas.

As the terminations failed, they exploded causing catastrophic damage to other equipment contained within the substation.

Municipal staff worked throughout the day and night as well as during the rainy weather to ensure that supply was restored to all the affected areas.

Experts have been tasked to conduct a full investigation into all the failed terminations to establish how the weather contributed to the failure.

Mayor James Nxumalo thanked all customers for their patience and understanding.

“Once again we apologise to all our customers for the inconvenience caused by this unfortunate incident. We also thank our staff for their hard work in ensuring that power is restored. We are confident that the investigation will assist us in developing better ways of responding to these incidents caused by nature in future,” said Nxumalo.

Customers are encouraged to report faults as they happen and not assume that they are caused by loadshedding as has happened with some customers over the festive period.
The City requests all effected customers to report power outages to the Electricity Call Centre (080 13 13 111).