Ward 99 councillor and Shadow MMC for Water and Power, Nicole van Dyk has urged Eskom to take action to protect its infrastructure from theft and vandalism.
This comes after the Randburg substation was vandalised and live cables were stolen, affecting most of Randburg’s suburbs with multiple outages each day. City Power and Eskom share the substation.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena acknowledged that live cables had been stolen during load-shedding.
“After load-shedding the transformer did not come back into service. They cut and stole cables. The following day we saw that on the Eskom side [of the substation] they had drained the transformer oil. We were out for a long time,” he said.
“We replaced the cables and we waiting for sanctioning on the Eskom side to turn on the power.”
Eskom spokesperson Amanda Qithi confirmed that about 10 000 litres of transformer oil had been drained from the transformer.
“We are aware of the theft of the transformer oil and we working on refilling the oil. We became aware of the incident on Wednesday, 12 July 2023 and then resumed the process to refill the transformer,” she said.
Qithi added the process took about three days to complete. They had to pump oil into the transformer, circulate and purify the oil and then draw a sample which was sent to the laboratory for testing.
“The laboratory results will determine the next steps to be followed such as switching back on the transformer and City Power taking load.”
After visiting the site, Van Dyk confirmed that City Power had completed the repairs and installed new cables.
“However, Eskom need to do repairs on their side. What this means is that only one transformer is working and they cannot spread the load on other transformers until the second transformer is up and running, and this is the cause of the many outages and trips happening.”
She added this was not the only vandalised substation in the area. The Windsor and Fontainebleau substations were similarly damaged.
“These are the substations that feed most of the Randburg area. We have not heard from Eskom about these failures, theft and vandalism happening on their premises. We want to know what Eskom is doing to protect its infrastructure.
“Eskom needs to improve their security and infrastructure protection, especially during load-shedding.”
Asked if there was a plan to prevent vandalism at substations, Qithi said they did conduct risk assessments to identify hotspot sites and placed guards there and were complimented by armed response patrols.
“Armed response patrols are conducted at interval periods at the identified sites. We also partner and collaborate with community members, community security companies, business forums, SAPS and Public Order Policing to try and reduce theft and vandalism of the electricity infrastructure. We constantly investigate alternative measures that will assist us to prevent the theft and vandalism of our equipment.”
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