Johannesburg - Twenty-one suburbs on the West Rand were plunged into darkness on Monday after a cable thief electrocuted himself trying to steal an 83 kilowatt cable from a substation.
The incident left huge traffic jams and frustrated residents and businesses in its wake.
The outage hit Roodepoort, Reefhaven, Lindhaven, Witpoortjie, Princess, Ontdekkers Park, Discovery, Selwyn, Horison, Helderkruin, Kloofendal, Wilropark, Roodekrans, Strubens Valley, Poortview, Honeydew, Wilgeheuwel, Constantia Kloof, Creswell Park, Matholeville and Weltevreden Park.
The Roodepoort and Roodetown substations in Van Wyk Street were affected.
Sapa reports that power was restored to parts of Roodepoort on Monday afternoon.
City Power spokesman Sol Masolo said technicians had restored power to Discovery, Selwyn, Horison and Ontdekkers Park.
Earlier, supply was reinstated to nine other areas.
Masolo said technicians were still working on the two affected substations and were committed to restoring electricity to the areas that were still without power.
“Our technical team, which has been working at the two substations since Monday morning, started the repair and restoration work as soon as the police removed the corpse and the fire was put out,” said Masolo.
Thieves removed the protective layers around the electrical cables at the Roodetown substation. When another thief tried to steal the actual cables at Roodepoort, he was immediately electrocuted because the two are interlinked.
While it was unconfirmed whether the two incidents were connected, City Power spokesman Louis Pieterse said they probably were because the substations are close to each other.
He said the exceedingly high voltage that flows through the cable meant the thief would have died even before he touched it.
“The protective layers were gone. You only have to be close to such high electricity voltage, you don’t even have to touch it. It jumps at you.”
The attempted theft caused the Roodepoort substation to catch fire. Firefighters from the Johannesburg Emergency Management Services were called out to the scene. The outage badly affected peak-hour traffic.
Motorists, particularly along Ontdekkers Road, spent hours on the road because all the traffic lights were out.
Metro police spokesman Senior Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said traffic had been badly affected and would continue to be while traffic lights were out. The Joburg Connect call centre was also affected, and there was a delay in answering residents’ calls.
Cable theft was a problem, said Pieterse, but with hundreds of kilometres of cable and 270 substations around the city, it was impossible to properly secure them all.
The Star