New Eskom gear leaves Kouga powerless

The Eskom power outages that left Kouga without electricity for several hours over the weekend have been attributed to teething problems with new equipment.

Kouga Executive Mayor Elza van Lingen said the Council was expecting a report from Eskom about the cause of the outages.

“The information that we have at the moment suggests that there were problems with new switchgear that Eskom had installed. We are, however, awaiting an official report from them as to what went wrong and what measures they have put in place to prevent a re occurrence,” she said.

She said the unexpected outages were bad for residents and bad for business.

“It is critical that outages are minimised and communicated properly,” she added.

The power supply to the whole of the Kouga region was interrupted for about four hours on Saturday morning and again for an hour on Sunday. It is believed that both outages were the result of operational problems with the new switchgear.