Power Outages in The Helderberg this Weekend

19 JULY 2012

STATEMENT BY THE CITY'S MAYORAL COMMITTEE MEMBER FOR UTILITY SERVICES, COUNCILLOR SHEHAAM SIMS

Eskom requested that the City of Cape Town's Electricity Services Department switch out the Helderberg Substation on Saturday 21 July 2012 to complete emergency work on their 132kV overhead line crossing Helderberg Substation. To do so areas normally supplied by the Helderberg Substation were supplied from Somerset West Substation. This arrangement removed the normal built-in redundancy in the electricity network whereby spare capacity in the network allows supply to be rerouted should a particular cable fail.

At 16:00 on Saturday the electricity supply to portions of Somerset  West was interrupted because one of the alternative feeder cables failed.

A risk analysis and load study which was done when Eskom requested the Helderberg Substation to be switched out, indicated that supply could be maintained by rerouting it through the Somerset West Substation. The alternative would have been to interrupt the supply to the area supplied by the Helderberg Substation from Saturday 06:00 to Sunday 18:00. Unfortunately the electricity supply was under severe pressure due to the cold weather conditions, and when one of the cables faulted, it resulted in an overloaded network and subsequent electricity supply failure to a wider area.  To restore the electricity supply under such conditions was a big challenge.

The work undertaken by Eskom was only completed on Monday morning at 02:00, partly due to the weather conditions.

Consumers were not notified of the work because the outage was not planned. The Eskom project was successfully completed and no further electricity supply interruptions are foreseen.

The City apologises to electricity consumers in the Helderberg area for the loss of electricity supply which resulted from the unexpected feeder cable fault.  It is unfortunately not possible to warn consumers of outages as a result of unexpected faults.

The City always does its best to notify residents of scheduled supply disruptions - as it has done for the planned interruption of electricity supply in Gordon's Bay and Sir Lowry's Pass Village on 29 July 2012.

Thanks,

Heinrich Heymann

Executive Support Officer for Clr Shehaam Sims Mayoral Committee Member for Utility Services

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