Minister of Public Enterprises Alec Erwin on Thursday denied ever saying that the infamous bolt thought to have tripped Cape Town’s Koeberg power station last year was the result of sabotage.
Erwin was quoted in Business Day on March 2 as saying “the bolt that caused the generators destruction did not get there by accident”. An e.tv news clip shows him saying “any interference with an electricity installation is an exceptionally serious crime. It is sabotage.”
His statement in Parliament on Thursday came on the same day that Eskom, at a media conference in Johannesburg, insisted that the bolt was also to blame for the power cut.
Eskom CEO Thulani Gcabashe told journalists that the 8cm bolt, found in the generator immediately after the shut-down of the station, had not, in fact, played a direct role in the tripping of unit 1, which plunged the Western Cape into darkness.
The Eskom report said the most probable cause of the incident was failure of “clean-condition” controls during repairs, when tools were left behind. It said an unknown foreign object damaged the generator’s insulation, leading to an earth fault, which in turn damaged the generator.
Speaking in the National Assembly, Erwin revealed that months of investigation by three agencies had failed to uncover how the bolt blamed for the power outage found its way into a non-nuclear gas turbine at Koeberg,
No evidence had been found of “any organised group of any sort being the agent of an act of sabotage at Koeberg”.
Erwin added that the police, Eskom security and the National Intelligence Agency could not establish conclusively whether the bolt had been placed there deliberately. The only explanation was “operational weaknesses in the clean-conditions controls” at Koeberg, as found in the Eskom investigation.
The Democratic Alliance and the Independent Democrats have called on Erwin to apologise for “deliberately misleading the public” by making the sabotage claim days before the March 1 local elections.
Erwin conceded that the issue of the bolt and his claim that its presence in the turbine had not been accidental had sparked massive public interest.
“Of as much interest has been whether I said that this was an act of sabotage. I did not say this, and all attempts I made to our erudite media to say what I did say merely got me into deeper linguistic difficulties.”
He said that after a major power cut on February 27 — two days before the elections — the generator was opened and the loose bolt found. “It was of a type that was used outside and not inside the generator,” Erwin said.
Early in the investigation “some discontent” on the part of employees was identified and a number of “unauthorised communications” from Eskom employees to “outside parties” had been made.
Responding to media charges that he had claimed sabotage “to avoid electoral problems”, he said: “The primary and sole focus of our actions was to ensure that we dealt with a major energy problem. Attempting to score political points in such a situation is a futile exercise.”
Erwin said Eskom acknowledged inadequacies in implementing procedures. However, the investigations showed events at Koeberg could not have been foreseen or easily prevented.
Eskom repeated that though it considered and took seriously the investigation and critical report released this week by the National Energy Regulator (NER), it disagreed with the NER’s conclusions that it had been negligent and violated its licence conditions.
The NER report blamed the Cape Town power cuts on Eskom’s failure to maintain infrastructure and suggested that the power utility should be fined 10% of its annual revenue, or about R3,6-billion.
Gcabashe said he would resist attempts to take punitive action against the company.
“Eskom accepts that there were oversights regarding some of its practices and procedures,” he said. “However this does not mean that Eskom has been negligent. Every technical fault does not amount to a breach of licence condition or negligence.”
The NER report relied heavily on Eskom’s own corporate technical audit department’s investigations into the power cuts. Eskom said its own investigations into the seven power failures confirmed that its planned maintenance was properly implemented within the “challenges and constraints of a complex operating environment”.
Gcabashe said he was disappointed that investigators could not pinpoint the precise circumstances that led to the generator’s failure. “Based on the circumstantial evidence, I am inclined towards the view that we are dealing with human error rather than any deliberate act or omission,” he said.