Water supply restored as City Power completes repairs at Eikenhof substation

City Power says it has completed the repairs at the Eikenhof substation and 100% of power supply to Rand Water Board has been restored.

There were multiple “dry” suburbs across Johannesburg on Monday as City Power conducted emergency repairs on a feeder board at the Eikenhof substation substation.

This was after Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station was affected by a power failure on City Power’s transformer, which was struck by lightning on Sunday.

Rand Water

The water outage left many residents in the city fuming as hot weather conditions enveloped Gauteng.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the second feeder board passed the tests around 10:30pm on Tuesday evening and has been successfully energized.

“Rand Water was informed at 23h00 to take the full load to pump water to its customers. Already, by early afternoon, Rand Water was pumping at 50% capacity after our teams managed to restore the first feeder board.

“Eikenhof substation experienced total loss of supply following a flash-over incident on one of the feeder boards on Monday evening. The flash-over happened as the teams were busy with the normalisation of the infrastructure following the Planned Maintenance between Orlando and Eikenhof substations over the weekend,” Mangena said.

ALSO READ: WATCH: City Power warns Eikenhof repairs may affect water supply in Joburg

Investigations

Mangena said the cause of the incident is still being investigated.

“We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this incident. We thank the team of dedicated technicians from City Power who worked hard throughout the day and night since the incident was reported, and without the help of contractors, managed to conduct all the tests and execute the repairs until power was eventually restored.”

Load shedding

Meanwhile, daytime load shedding continues to remain suspended for the week ahead before implementing stage 2 in the evenings.

Eskom said alternating pattern of suspending load shedding from 5am until 4pm and implementing stage 2 load shedding from 4pm until 5am will be repeated daily until further notice.

ALSO READ: City Power introduces independent power producers as it battles load shedding