Durban - The electricity unit in eThekwini Municipality is investigating what caused the massive power outage on Tuesday night that plunged half of the metro into darkness, as they have found no reason that can explain it.
Head of Electricity in eThekwini, Maxwell Mthembu said they were conducting an investigation into the situation, but for the moment they had found no scientific or technical reason to explain what had happened.
He ruled out any concerns that the infrastructure might have temporarily failed, saying that was not the case, and that their infrastructure was well-maintained.
“We have not found any technical reasons for what led to what happened; we can only speak to the series of strange events that occurred prior to the outage,” said Mthembu in an interview with The Mercury yesterday.
“In Durban there was a lot of lightning. Prior to the outage, maybe 30 seconds before the outage, there was a big lightning strike, which was followed by the outage,” said Mthembu.
He also said that despite what had been initially reported, there was no explosion at the Klaarwater substation, but an electrical line in the Shallcross area fell to the ground, which triggered the faults.
“We found that one of the cables in the Shallcross area had fallen to the ground. The problem was not in Klaarwater station, but it was the line in Shallcross. A lot of people said there was an explosion, but there was no explosion,” Mthembu said.
“The engineering term for what happened (what looked like an explosion) is an electric arc – a spark that looked like an explosion. If that had been an explosion in a substation, that would still be burning right now, as there is a lot of oil in a substation,” he said.
He said the outer west areas like Reservoir Hills, Westville and Pinetown, among others, were the most affected by the outage.
By yesterday afternoon, most of the areas’ power had been restored, but there were a few homes that were still without power in the Shallcross area.
The city said in a statement that its employees were attending to the faults in the area and believed that power in all the affected areas would be restored by the end of yesterday.
Mthembu said as part of the strange phenomenon that unfolded on Tuesday night, they noticed that after the lightning, the temperature in Durban spiked by a few degrees Celsius.
“There are many things that we just cannot explain at the moment that happened on Tuesday,” he said.
“When that line fell to the ground, pieces of it broke and fell onto people’s houses. Yet when we checked the line we found no technical reason why it had broken in the first place; there is no indication of sabotage,” he said.
Mthembu heaped praise on the electricity staff that attended to the crisis, saying they had performed a near miracle by restoring the power in a short space of time.
“It seemed that even God was on our side at that time. The employees of the unit were able to restore the power supply in two hours, when it seemed like there was no hope that the supply would be restored.
“The employees in the unit deserve credit for the way they worked.
“The unit does not have consultants; all the employees that attend to those faults are our own employees who are employed full-time by the municipality. The way they responded to the matter shows that the investment the city has made in these employees was paying off,” said Mthembu.
Several residents took to social media to compliment the city for the speedy restoration of power on Tuesday, while others questioned the maintenance of the infrastructure.
In July this year, when the city announced the return of load shedding, which had been halted after the April floods, it said it had lost 50% (between 700MW to 800MW) of electrical load on their electrical infrastructure due to the flood damage.
It said at the time that it was currently operating in an emergency capacity for electrical services, and the “integrity of the electrical infrastructure was so compromised that if parts of the infrastructure and loads were to trip, either through a manual intervention (load shedding) or an electrical fault, it is possible and likely that the municipality grid could be even more severely damaged”.