By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The City of Cape Town has restored power to all the areas affected by the outage, including the entire CBD and Atlantic Seaboard.
The mayoral committee member for energy and climate change Beverley van Reenen says the supply of electricity has been restored through lines that had been out for maintenance, are being used to restore the power and they are using lines feeding other areas.
Repairs to the damaged cables will take up to five weeks.
“Supply to the affected areas was returned load permitting. It is anticipated that all load should be restored by this evening,” she said.
The blackout occurred after a 132 kV overhead line that supplies load to the CBD and surrounds, was damaged. A fire affecting the infrastructure aggravated the problem.
The Atlantic Seaboard, parts of Woodstock and the inner-city bore the brunt of the outage from around 7pm on Monday.
As the lights came back on Tuesday, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis promised a thorough probe into what exactly caused the Mother City to have no electricity for about 15 hours.
“I am very grateful to the City’s engineering and technical teams who have worked nearly 24 hours under extreme pressure to get this done. And ‘thank you’ to residents for your patience,” Hill-Lewis said.
“All possibilities will be investigated,”he said.
The power failure may have been the result of foul play but the City says these claims are yet to be confirmed.
Assessments were still under way to determine the full extent of the damage.