A substation exploded opposite Newcastle Corner on Wednesday morning, 15 February 2023, seeing a team from the Newcastle Municipality’s Electrical Department rushing to the site to resolve the issue.
According to Cllr Bertie Meiring, the substation flooded on Tuesday, 14 February 2023, following the heavy rainfall.
Cllr Meiring further explained that the Newcastle Municipality had to switch the substation off until it was fully dried, and safe to restart.
However, switching the substation off, resulted in parts of Hutten Heights and Amiel Park being without electricity.
Despite the Newcastle Municipality’s best efforts to restore the power on Tuesday, the explosion on Wednesday saw the same suburbs plunged into darkness shortly after 10 am.
Cllr Meiring said the Newcastle Municipality was investigating the incident and had bypassed the cable at the substation to restore power to the suburbs. However, he noted, “We might encounter further problems because the substation was flooded before.”
With the potential for further issues, Cllr Meiring assured the Newcastle Municipality was on the issue and would resolve the problem as soon as possible to avert additional power outages.
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Comments 2
Maybe the time has arrived that we pay half our rates to municipalities and the other half to a neutral private company that can manage maintenance and replacement of infrastructure. We really expect too much from our own dysfunctional municipalities. They are going to destroy our beautiful cities
To prevent this from happening in the near future they should put a proper drainage system around a substation.