Pretoria - Occupants of critical government buildings in the Pretoria CBD were forced to endure power outages from last Wednesday due to the flooding of a City of Tshwane substation.
Since the incident was discovered last week in the basement of the Gauteng government building where the substation was located, the municipality has been working around the clock to make sure it was repaired.
Municipal spokesperson Selby Bokaba yesterday reported that power has been restored in the affected buildings, which included the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, Pretoria Central Police Station, offices of the Gauteng government, and the Department of Social Development.
Bokaba said the flooding of the substation on the corner of Bosman and Pretorius Streets resulted in a power outage to nearby consumers, including critical institutions.
“Tshwane is pleased to announce that power has fully been restored just after 11am today (yesterday) to the customers that are supplied by the substation which is housed at the basement of the Gauteng Provincial Government building, on the corner of Bosman and Pretorius Streets in the Pretoria CBD,” he said.
He said technicians managed to successfully drain the water. They cleaned and dried out the panels to the substation that was flooded as this all led to the power outage which affected key government institutions.
The problem also affected consumers using streets such as Kgosi Mampuru, Madiba, WF Nkomo and Sophie de Bruyn.
Bokaba said: “The City appreciates consumers’ patience during that period of an unforeseen interruption.”
According to him, the cause of the flooding was not yet known.
On Monday municipal technicians were hard at work draining the water in an effort to make sure that the water level was below the substation level.
“Initially, the water level was at 2 300 millilitres high and now it’s sitting at 300 millilitres, which is an indication of good progress made towards draining out the water,” Bokaba said.
He also promised that they expected the process to be completed soon.
Following the draining process, the team assessed the damage, which included drying and testing of the panels.
Water, Bokaba said, entered the switch gears, and the team needed to replace oil as a precautionary measure.
Pretoria News