Large parts of Pretoria plunged into darkness
Large parts of the City of Tshwane metropolitan municipality were hit by a power outage at 20:55 on Friday.
Neighbourhoods across the city are experiencing outages, with mixed reports on the cause of the power interruption.
One message circulating among community groups indicates that several substations are offline, suggesting a trip affecting an in-feed.
“It is not just Mirage, but Aries substation too. Wingate substation also appears to be down. Either there is a trip at all of them, or at the Njala main in-feed substation,” the message stated.
“Either way, the issue sits outside of the ward and outside of the region with a large portion of the East of Pretoria off. The Department is aware. We will need to wait and see what they find.”
Residents in Centurion also reported widespread outages, with Alderman Peter Sutton stating that an explosion at a mini-substation may have caused a wider trip.
“Good evening residents, feedback received from the depot is that a switching team is assigned to investigate the cause of the current power outage,” he stated.
“This team is currently busy in another area and will move to our area next. I do not have a committed time yet as to when they will be on site.”
Tshwane acknowledged the outage in response to a resident on Twitter/X and confirmed that a switching team was notified to attend.
Councillor for Ward 57, Jack Page, said that a fire reported near Wingate Park was the likely reason for the area outage. Residents in that area reported hearing explosions before the power went off.
Some Centurion residents were further impacted by two mini-substations that blew earlier on Friday evening on Von Willich Street.
The area outage was resolved shortly after 01:00 on Saturday. Repairs to the Von Willich substations could only continue later on Saturday.
Second widespread outage in two months
This is the second time in under two months that Tshwane has experienced power interruptions across a substantial portion of the city.
At the end of January, trips at the Njala substation caused a large electricity outage that took several hours to resolve, with a hailstorm further delaying repairs.
The reason for the trips was not confirmed, except for a general explanation that such trips occurred automatically as a safety shutdown.
“These happen when the system detects an abnormal condition, such as a fault, overload, or voltage instability. This is a protective measure to prevent damage to infrastructure,” Tshwane stated at the time.
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