Residents in the dark, but construction site is lit up

POLOKWANE – Angry Thornhill residents claim that while they sit in the dark due to load shedding, there is electricity at the new Motor City construction site.

“We had a power outage in Thornhill last Friday. The electricity went off after 13:00 and was only restored the next day. While we were without electricity, Motor City had electricity, and this is very unfair. The municipality could not give us a reason for the power outage, nor could they estimate how long we would be without electricity. Hundreds of us were left in the dark,” a resident said.

Municipal spokesperson, Matshidiso Mothapo, said on Friday, there was damage to the ring main unit (RMU) and switch gear at the Thornhill substation.

“These two problems caused the residence to be without power for that long, but we managed to restore power. We have several smaller electrical substations connected to our larger electrical substations via its own set of cables. In this case, both the smaller Thornhill’s and Motor City’s substations are supplied from Iota Substation. But only the cables of Thornhill’s substation had a fault and therefore only Thornhill was effected, while Motor City’s substation was still on,” Mothapo said.

He added this was the same reason not all areas were off at the same time during load shedding.