City Power to conduct emergency isolation of Eldorado Park substation – Here’s why

Eldorado Park residents are up in arms following the delay in repairing the fire gutted substation.

Since last week, City Power’s technicians have been working around the clock to fix transformers damaged by the blaze.

On Thursday night, residents barricaded roads with burning tyres after City Power announced electricity would only be restored in the next seven days.

In the latest update, the power utility said it will have to conduct emergency isolation of the Eldorado substation line from Orlando.

It said the 88kV Eldorado 1 transmission line feeding transformer No.1 was switched on Thursday and provides areas such as Freedom Park, Mpumelelo, and parts of Devland.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said technicians are working around the clock to repair the transformers.

“For us to energise transformer Nr 3 which passed the tests after it was affected by the blow-up incident on Wednesday during the switch on, we need to switch off Eldorado line Nr 1, and move the transformer Nr 3 line on to that feeder board.  We expect this emergency isolation to take just over an hour between 7am and 8am this morning.”

“This will happen parallel to the work going on at Eldorado Park substation, as part of the best-case scenario of ensuring we restore in two days instead of seven days,” Mangena said.

Last week, City of Johannesburg Executive Mayor Mpho Phalatse said the blaze which gutted the Eldorado Park substation was a deliberate act of sabotage.

Phalatse instructed the city’s group forensic and investigation services unit to accelerate the rollout of a strategy to stop attacks on the city’s economic infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Eskom is expected to suspend load shedding on Friday, if all goes according to plan.

Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter on Thursday said the system was recovering.

“[By] after evening peak on Friday evening we will be hopefully in a position lift load shedding in its entirety for the weekend depending on how the system performs.”

The country is currently on stage 2 load shedding.

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