City Power in Johannesburg said it has managed to repair the damaged electricity infrastructure on the M1 highway tunnel in Johannesburg and fully restored power to affected areas.
The damaged was caused by vandalism and cable theft on May 1st, which cost the entity about R160 million.
“The entity will request an emergency isolation in order to facilitate the process of restoring full supply.
We wish to notify customers that power supply will be momentarily interrupted between 08h30 to 10h00 this morning (Tuesday) to move the load back to the Braamfontein substation.
Yesterday, the newly installed 88kV cable passed the test and shortly after that, it was livened up,” said City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena.
Mangena added that the load will be moved from some of the contingency measures that had been put in place such as interconnectors and a generator but will be moved back to the 88kV cable.
That cable along with several others were gutted by fire less almost two weeks ago.
“The fire was caused by acts of theft and vandalism.
In the interim, the team has been providing supply to some customers using interconnector cables.
Because those cables are not designed to carry a huge load, we could not restore all customers at once,” explained Mangena.
According to the entity, as of Monday, more than 90% of customers had already been restored using those temporary measures.
That outage affected customers in Parktown, Newtown, Braamfontein, the Johannesburg CBD, and surrounding areas.
Mangena urged customers to keep all appliances unplugged to avoid overloading the network.
