By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
City Power has warned residents of prolonged outages after the local substation burnt down in Brixton,Johannesburg on Sunday night.
A trip at the power utility’s Brixton transformer sparked a fire on Sunday night.
“The utility is in the process of appointing a contractor to conduct an overall assessment on Monday ,” it said in a statement.
“As a result of the fire, pumping from Johannesburg Water’s Brixton reservoir to the Brixton tower will be affected.”
This is the second time in the past week that electricity supply issues have affected the pumping of water to residents in Joburg.
Last week Thursday, a major City Power station tripped in Soweto, leaving Rand Water’s Eikenhof station without electricity and unable to pump water.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the substation along Fulham and Ripley roads in Brixton had caught fire around 18:00.
“According to the preliminary investigations, it was triggered by overloading. Unfortunately, by the time the fire department arrived on site, the damage was already extensive and nothing could be salvaged,” he said.
“Every piece of equipment was reduced to ashes. City Power is now in the process of appointing a contractor to conduct an overall assessment today and give an estimation of the financial losses and the duration required to complete the repairs.”
Mangena said the Hursthill Service Delivery Centre (SDC) was in the process of ordering two mini-substations, a Ring Main Unit (RMU), cables and joints.
“Additional material may be required after the assessment. We are ramping up efforts to try and shorten the the duration of the outage to customers in Brixton, Rossmore and surroundings,” he added.
Further updates will be posted on Twitter via City Power(@CityPowerJhb) and Joburg Water’s (@JHBWater) official pages.