Electricity finally restored to Eldorado Park almost a week later

Electricity has finally been restored to all the residents who were affected by the fire at the Eldorado substation, south of Johannesburg.

According to City Power, Eldorado Park Ext 7, 5, 2, 4, Freedom Park, and parts of Devland were switched on in the early hours of Saturday.

The switch-on faced a number of challenges which left residents without electricity for almost a week.

The Eldorado Park substation was gutted by fire on Easter Friday plunging several areas into darkness.

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City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the power utility’s teams and contractors worked around the clock to ensure that work is completed and power is restored.

“The last of the repairs were completed on Friday as promised, but the main transformer had to be switched on for at least 12 hours before customers could be loaded gradually.  A standby transformer has been brought to site which will be used as an alternative, especially with winter coming.”

“The only customers that will remain off are Devland Industrial who are off due to stolen cables and cable fault, and parts of Pimville who are affected by multiple cable faults,” Mangena said.

City Power will continue tracing and repairing the faults to ensure electricity is restored, he said.

“We also suspect more localised faults due to theft and vandalism that will affect individual customers in Eldorado Park. The area was plagued by theft and vandalism of electricity infrastructure during the downtime.”

City Power has apologised for the inconvenience the fire that left residents without electricity during the Holy month of Ramadan and Easter weekend.

Last week, Mayor Mpho Phalatse said the fire 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.

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