The metropolitan area of Cape Town was without power for almost two hours on Friday afternoon, apparently due to a technical problem related to the Koeberg power station. The power cut occurred just after 2pm.
Cape Town mayoral spokesperson Sputnik Ratau said that it was ”an Eskom problem … Eskom is working on it”. He said initially that the power would remain off for another two hours, but the power returned at about 3.45pm while he was being interviewed.
He said the mayor, Nomaindia Mfeketo, had not yet issued a statement but official opposition Democratic Alliance councillor Belinda Walker — also councillor for the city bowl and central business district of Cape Town — said that she understood that the outage extended to Malmesbury, half an hour away from Cape Town.
Meanwhile, at Parliament, workers, MPs and journalists flooded out of the buildings on to Parliament Street. One parliamentary journalist was stuck in a lift for a short period until she was rescued by parliamentary staff.
Office workers were seen mingling on the streets and drivers negotiated intersections carefully as all traffic lights were out.
An outage at the Koeberg nuclear power station cut the electricity supply to the Cape Town city centre, an Eskom spokesperson said.
”Koeberg nuclear power station is not generating electricity currently,” Trish da Silva said at 4pm.
Koeberg’s unit one was out for repairs on Friday and its unit two tripped, said Da Silva.
”Their reactor shut down, the turbines shut down, which is all in accordance with normal safety procedure.”
She said Eskom had begun drawing in electricity from other parts of the South African grid and was restoring its bulk supply to the city of Cape Town.
She was waiting for a full list of the areas affected, but there were reports that towns as far afield as Hermanus and Swellendam were affected for ”a couple of minutes”. Power was being restored ”block by block”. — Sapa, I-Net Bridge