City Power on Wednesday said it had restored electricity supplies to more suburbs in the south of Johannesburg that had been experiencing an outage since Monday’s fire at Robertsham substation.
City Power said its “teams worked for a second night in a row to ensure power is restored to all residents affected by Robertsham substation fire which happened on Monday night.
“By the end of yesterday we had managed to backfeed six distributors to restore electricity to Chrisville, Crown Gardens, Robertsham, West Turfontein, and parts of Ormonde.”
Suburbs that still do not have electricity include Booysens, Ridgeway, Winchester Hills, Nasrec, Southdale, Ophirton, Glenada, Aeroton, Evans Park, and Gillview.
“We couldn’t backfeed all the customers from the available substations around due to the overloading that was going to trip the other substation,” said City Power in a statement Wednesday morning.
“The rain also delayed some progress on the repairs.
“By last night the team managed to bring back the two spare transformers that survived the fire, and they both passed the tests.
“We are this morning finalising the tests on the protection between Robertsham and Fordsburg substation, where the damaged substation is fed from.”
City Power said if “all goes well” they will bring the much-needed capacity to start restoring all outstanding customers.
“We are hoping to have an all-clear by later today after which power will be restored to all – if everything goes according to plan.”
