City Power says repairs to the electricity infrastructure affected by the Mayfair substation explosion are now 95% complete, with power expected to be restored gradually from Thursday morning.
This follows technical challenges that delayed the planned start of the first phase of electricity restoration to critical customers, including the SABC and Netcare Garden City Hospital.
The prolonged outage has affected several areas, including Mayfair, Crown, Auckland Park, Vrededorp, Brixton, Crosby, Pageview, Homestead Park and Amalgam.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena says the priority is to restore electricity to essential services.
Mangena says, “The teams have managed to basically liven up one of the transformers at Hesdale substation, which is the transformer that we were looking to use to basically restore the critical infrastructure or essential services that include the SABC, Garden City Hospital and other essential services around the area “.
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“The team is finalising the repairs, which are sitting at about 95% this morning. We are basically doing the last jointing of the cables, and also we’ll do the testing, and then from there we’ll then pull in the load and start doing the restoration,” Mangena added.
A secondary explosion at the substation on Monday evening disrupted electricity supply to several areas, including Auckland Park, Melville, Crosby and Brixton, severely disrupting transmission at the SABC and affecting operations at Garden City Hospital.
The power utility says it is implementing a phased approach to restore power to affected areas, with critical customers prioritised under phase one of the recovery plan.
Mangena says restoration work for phase two customers will continue gradually, with electricity supply expected to be fully restored to all affected areas by the end of the week.
He says, “I’m happy to announce that we have managed to liven up a transformer from Hursthill substation, as indicated yesterday (Wednesday)sday), that there was work that was basically happening there. The team has been working around the clock, even this morning. Some of them are just finishing up, basically doing some work there. So we managed to switch on a transformer that will then feed electricity to those customers that we have categorised under phase one, which include the Garden City Hospital, China Mall, Sentec and also SABC. And what we are waiting for is to finalise the testing of the cables that we are basically going to use to feed those phase one customers.”