Durban - One of the underground cables supplying electricity to the Sherwood area, which has been experiencing a series of power outages, dates back to the end of World War II.
Warren Burne, the DA councillor for the area, said the party recently discovered that one of the troublesome cables that has caused numerous faults in the area may have been installed in 1945.
The revelation came as many parts of Durban have been besieged by power outages that at times have lasted for several days.
The challenge of power outages has prompted DA caucus leader Thabani Mthethwa to demand a meeting with the head of electricity, Maxwell Mthembu, after a power outage in Phoenix lasted more than 40 hours at the weekend.
“The purpose of this meeting is to find a long-term solution to what is clearly an ongoing electricity crisis in the city. This has caused pain and suffering for residents, who must now dispose of food they have worked hard to obtain,” Mthethwa said.
He identified ageing infrastructure as a major contributing factor to the power crisis facing the city.
“We have a serious challenge of infrastructure decay because not enough money had been set aside for maintenance of infrastructure.”
He said prior to the 2022/23 budget being approved, the DA had requested that money be shifted from non-essential items towards infrastructure, but this was not supported.
Speaking of the outages in his area, Burne said during the festive season, some outages were severe, lasting for days. “One of the problems we have faced is the cable that supplies power to that area.
“We have found that if power is restored in one part of the area, there would be another outage elsewhere.”
He said they had since been informed that the outages could be linked to faults in the cable. “The underground cable dates back to 1945. This cable is where most of the faults are occurring.”
Burne said the fact that one of the cables dates back more than 70 years raised serious concerns about the municipality’s programme of maintaining and renewing its infrastructure.
The city has admitted in previous reports that its infrastructure is old and in desperate need of repairs.
Mthembu said the age of the cable was not the issue, noting that these cables were built to last and only needed to be changed if they had been interfered with or the demand began to exceed the supply capacity of the cable.
Mthembu said it was possible that the old underground cable could be responsible for the many electrical faults in the area.
“That is true, the cables we install could be underground for 100 years or more if they have not been interfered with. We only change these cables once the community has grown and they are being overloaded.”
Mthembu said the problem with the Sherwood area was illegal connections. “In that area there is always interference, every time someone who’s not counted as part of the area make illegal connections.”
Outages would also be more common now because of the ongoing load shedding by Eskom, he said which is putting electricity infrastructure under strain.
“Every time this infrastructure is switched on and off (like this) you have to start maintaining it. We are not doing it, nobody in the country is doing it, because there is no budget in the world that could accommodate that as power could be switched on and off three times a day,” he said.
Mthembu said over the next three years, his unit would invest around R400 million repairing infrastructure that was damaged by the storms.
He identified eight critical sub-stations that needed to be repaired at a cost of R38 million each.