Alarm as city power cuts out

The Witness: "Alarm as city power cuts out
24 Mar 2009"
While a tenuous power supply could be leaving parts of the city vulnerable to outages of massive proportions, residents have been warned to cut back on their power consumption as much as possible to ease the load on the ailing system, which failed on Monday night.

Power to those parts of the city affected was restored last night, easing the mass panic that ensued yesterday after a rumour circulated that the electricity would be off for up to four days.

Phil Mashoko, deputy municipal manager for infrastructure services, quashed the rumour, but admitted that the power supply to the parts of the city that went down yesterday is now operating at 50% risk, meaning that it if goes down, there is no replacement and nothing to use as standby.

“If it faults, we have a big problem,” said Mashoko.