Yet another power failure hit Johannesburg’s western suburbs on Friday.
According to the city’s call centre, the power failure covered Auckland Park, Westdene, Newlands, Albertville, Melville, Triomf and Northcliff.
The area, a busy mixture of residences, businesses and medical facilities, is regularly left without power.
Last year, supermarkets and restaurants were forced to throw away truckloads of food that rotted during a prolonged outage and shopkeepers sat silently in their darkened, empty shops.
This week alone, there have been several power failures across town, including Newtown and Parkhurst, attributed variously to an attempted cable theft or to the inclement weather.
City Power, the company that manages the city’s power supply, could not supply a reason immediately for the outage.
The company’s website explains that it is often extremely difficult to establish the cause of a fault or to estimate how long it will take to restore power after a fault.
An unplanned outage, or fault, occurs when the power goes off without warning, due to storms, vandalism, theft, failure of equipment or an emergency switch-off, and there is no time to notify customers of the fault in advance, the website said. — Sapa