Cape Town - Ageing infrastructure at electricity substations around the country are ticking bombs, an electricity spokesperson said after recent explosions in Port Elizabeth and Kempton Park.
An explosion at a substation in Walmer, Port Elizabeth on Friday happened because the circuit breakers were not designed to be switched on and off at regular intervals as had been done during load shedding, it was reported.
Four days later, Kempton Park in Johannesburg was hit by a major power failure on Tuesday when a substation in the central business district went up in flames. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined.
Charles Kadalie, manager for public lighting for the city of Cape Town, said the problem has been a long time in coming.
'Abnormal' situation
"Late last year we had an explosion in one of our substations and there were five of our staff in the substation when it exploded," he told News24. "One died, and three of them were critical in hospital."
Kadalie explained that along with ageing equipment, the "abnormal" situation of load shedding put extreme strain on infrastructure generally.
"The fact of the matter is [load shedding] is causing a lot of stress and strain countrywide on the electricity grid and the electricity network," said Kadalie.
He pointed out that maintenance strategies and networks were made to grow. "This is a complete reversal of what you are trained to do," he said. "It's the kind of things that you don't really factor into your planning."
Kadalie listed underground cables, transformers, and oil circuit breakers as things that would take strain with increased pressure from load shedding. "The insulation goes, gasses are being formed in your oil circuit breakers and your transformers and before it settles you're switching it back on again."
Lethal
He described the situation as "lethal" and said while he didn't want to scare people, he was concerned.
Nelson Mandela Bay electricity spokesperson, Lourens Schoeman acknowledged that load shedding was a problem but said that a new load shedding schedule for his municipality on Monday would place less strain on the system.
"It will allow for only three days of load shedding instead of the six that we normally have," he said.
Schoeman said to replace all the circuit breakers in the municipality, like the ones that caused the explosion, would cost about R50m.
"We do the normal maintenance but we just don't have that kind of money available."
Parts of PE affected by the blast were still without power on Thursday morning, while restoring power to the Kempton Park CBD could take a week according to the municipality.
Eskom had not yet answered questions about the situation at the time of publication.
