eThekwini residents, who have been spared frequent blackouts since floods ravaged KwaZulu-Natal, will again be included in rolling Eskom load-shedding from August 1.
The decision by Eskom, made in agreement with the municipality, bodes ill for the recovery of the city from the severe floods, which caused unprecedented infrastructure damage in April and May.
In a joint statement with the eThekwini metro on Monday, Eskom said it accepted that the municipality’s electrical network and water infrastructure was in “an extremely vulnerable” state. Additional risk needs to be managed carefully.
According to the statement, the two parties said the municipality agreed on the process for the implementation of load-shedding to assist Eskom in mitigating the risk of a national grid collapse. The municipality will resume load-shedding at the same levels as before the flooding.
On April 11 a severe weather system triggered downpours of over 300mm of rainfall over a 24-hour period in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and parts of the Eastern Cape. The national government formally declared the floods a national disaster.
While many municipalities across KwaZulu-Natal were affected in varying degrees, the eThekwini metro in particular took the full force of the storm. Key infrastructure — such as roads, bridges, electricity pylons and water pipes — was damaged. The scale of the disaster in eThekwini was unprecedented, with damage amounting to R7bn.
“In the aftermath of the disaster, the municipality lost 50% [between 700MW to 800MW] of electrical load on our electrical infrastructure. A significant portion of this load has not been restored and will continue to be off the grid until extensive repairs are carried out,” head of metro electricity Maxwell Mthembu told Business Day on Monday.
“Importantly, there is agreement that the integrity of the electrical infrastructure was so severely compromised that if parts of the infrastructure and loads were to trip either through a manual intervention [load-shedding] or an electrical fault, it is possible and likely that the municipality grid could be even more severely damaged, thus lengthening the duration of the outage.”
Mthembu said Eskom and the municipality were mindful that further electrical damage would severely compromise the water rationing programme, which was introduced immediately after the disaster to protect the municipality’s water supply.
“To date in many areas water supply has not been restored. As a result there is agreement that the municipality is operating in an emergency capacity for both electrical and water services,” said the statement.
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