Large parts of Hartbeespoort were without electricity on Thursday after the switchgear at the Ifafi substation exploded when the technician of the Madibeng municipality tried to switch the electricity back on after loadshedding.
This left Melodie, Melodie smallholdings and parts of Ifafi without electricity supply for most of the day.
Kormorant reported on the state of this substation recently after an oversight visit by councillor Claudie Greenwood-Selby and experts after the municipality failed to respond to her request for an oversight visit to address the repeated electricity failures.
“After repeated requests to the municipal manager for permission to inspect the substation since November last year and being ignored, I put together a team of experts who assisted with the oversight,” she said.
“Several compliance issues were found and we discovered that the last compliance audit seems to have been done in 2005. And then, after expressing my concern that the substation is dangerous, what we feared happened and the switchgear exploded, almost costing the technician’s life,” she said.
Greenwood-Selby compiled a report and escalated it to NERSA. NERSA responded by saying it requested an electricity distribution compliance audit to be conducted in 2022 but it was thwarted by the COVID 19 pandemic.
NERSA then conducted a desktop compliance audit which only focused on the business assessment of the municipality. “The second phase of the audit, which included sample inspection of substations, mini-substations, overhead lines, switching stations and other aspects of the network (such as the stores and single line diagrams) was then conducted in October 2021. NERSA compiled a report and recommendations were made on a number of non-compliances that were identified. The municipality is yet to submit the corrective action plan detailing how are they planning to rectify all the non-compliances raised in the final report. NERSA will then schedule a visit to the municipality to monitor the progress in their corrective action plan,” NERSA responded.
Greenwood-Selby has requested the audit report.