Power restored to Cape Town but repairs to damaged cables to take five weeks

The City of Cape Town said power was restored to all areas on Tuesday afternoon after a huge outage on Monday.

Parts of Cape Town were plunged into darkness after a “technical fault” on the grid. Area 7, which includes Green Point, Sea Point, Camps Bay and Clifton, was affected.

On Tuesday morning, the city said its electricity generation and distribution department worked throughout the night to restore power using different supply routes.

This after one of the main feeder lines from the Acacia high-voltage substation to Montagu Gardens and Eskom’s Tafelbaai high-voltage substation were lost.

A fire affecting infrastructure worsened the situation.

“I’m really pleased that the majority of the affected areas has now been reconnected, and our officials have confirmed that areas not yet online will be reconnected by 4.30pm today,” Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said earlier on Tuesday.

Hill-Lewis thanked the residents of Cape Town for their patience.

“The initial focus was on restoring supply to vulnerable areas including hospitals, clinics and medical storage facilities.

“Once we had secured these , our staff turned their attention to the rest of the affected areas and had many back online by midday,” Hill-Lewis said.

He said the cause of the outage was identified as major cable damage to City and Eskom feeders in conjunction with the loss of a conductor on the Eskom overhead line.

He said the cable damage resulted in the tripping of all cables feeding Area 7.

Hill-Lewis said supplyto the area was being restored by returning to service cables that had tripped and cables that had been out for maintenance.

He said repairs to the damaged cables will take up to five weeks.

TimesLIVE