Power was back on in various parts of Johannesburg after a blackout on Wednesday night.
A Westdene resident said power had been returned to the area and that she was happily cooking dinner.
The Langlaagte police station, which is home to the flying squad, was also reported to have power.
Westdene, Auckland Park, Melville, Brixton, Riverlea and Langlaagte were all said to be in the dark after the earlier blackout.
Those who could watch South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) news at 7pm could see the broadcaster’s atrium, behind the newsreader, was in darkness due to the power cut. The SABC is located in Auckland Park.
Johannesburg City Power spokesperson Sol Masolo was not immediately available for comment.
A call to the City Power help line was met with a recorded message saying large parts of the city and surrounding areas were blacked out due to the failure of two substations.
The voice said technicians were working on the problem and power would be restored ”soon”.
City Power told the SABC that two sub-stations experiencing electrical faults were the cause of the power failure.
The outage followed another last week that blacked out Rosebank, Houghton and surrounding areas.
Last year, the Westdene-Sophiatown area was powerless for four days after a substation at Hurst Hill was destroyed by a fire.
On Tuesday, City Power said it would lodge a complaint against the National Energy Regulator (NER) for a damning report on the poor state of the city’s power infrastructure.
It said the report contained inaccuracies and failed to mention progress made since 2001.
But NER spokesperson Nhlanhla Cebekhulu said the NER had done nothing untoward.
”City Power was given the chance to respond to the findings … We have its response,” he said. ”City Power should start fixing the power stations that are not functioning properly, so that we have fewer outages in Johannesburg.”
The NER conducted an audit on City Power earlier this year because it was concerned about the large number and severity of power interruptions caused by the poor state of electricity-distribution infrastructure.
”The NER is of the opinion that the City Power network is in a serious state of disrepair,” the report read. ”Even if the maintenance and refurbishment plans are properly executed each year, it will still take a number of years to bring the network back to the required level of reliability.”
The report found that there were serious transformer leaks, even at some of the major infeed substations, that there appeared to be insufficient maintenance standards for power equipment, and that no budget was set aside to accelerate plant refurbishment.
The NER said City Power lacked a credible paper trail and records, that there was evidence of non-adherence to work procedures, that sites and substations were not being sufficiently maintained and that there was a negative impact on the environment.
City Power said it had maintenance and refurbishment plans in place to bring the network back to an acceptable state.
City Power said it had spent R450-million on upgrading and refurbishing the city’s supply network in the financial year of 2004/05. This amount was set to increase to R675-million for the financial year 2005/06.
City Power said this aggressive spending on infrastructure had seen a reduction in the number of power outages by 37% compared with last year. — Sapa