Dolphin Coast residents have been enduring constant electricity cuts – a worry ahead of the festive season.
DA councillor Malcolm Hubner said the North Coast attracts thousands of visitors from all over the country where it is expected that basic infrastructure is functional.
“We know that electricians are working on the problem but it should have been fixed earlier.
“There is now a rush to get it sorted before the festive season but what about when residents have been inconvenienced throughout the year?”
KwaDukuza is the fastest growing municipality in the country, with Ilembe district attracting more than 800 000 visitors from March 2017 to February 2018, who put about R1.5 billion into the local economy.
The Dolphin Coast is the largest tourist destination in the district.
It is still unclear what the fault is in the Salt Rock, Sheffield and Fox Hill areas where weekly power outages have been the norm for the last six months.
Also read: Plans in place to solve Salt Rock power outages
KDM executive director for electrical engineering Sibusiso Jali told the Courier last week that work was underway to find and fix the problem at the R33 million substation installed at Salt Rock in 2014.
“The oil analysis started on Friday and it should take about a week before we get results. This will tell us exactly what to fix and we cannot act until then.
“We have brought in a transformer specialist and established that one of the two transformers was causing the substation to automatically switch off.
“This problem originates in the protection settings that prevent the machine from overheating.”
Jali said the major power outages in Ballito last Wednesday and Thursday, were caused by a fault from the main electricity feed at the Driefontein substation and said that the problem had been fixed.
“There are two feeds which send power to Ballito and another that sends power to Salt Rock. Generally, if the Ballito line gives us a problem, we switch over to the second feed but this time Eskom was busy working on the conductors.”
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