City Power is investigating after a technician was injured in an explosion at the Crown substation in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Spokesperson Isaac Mangena said a team was working at the substation when they experienced a "flashover from the busbar area". The cause of the flashover is being investigated.

“The technician was taken to the hospital where he is receiving treatment.”

He said the incident led to an outage from Crown substation affecting four distributors feeding Ormonde View, Booysens Reserve, Therta and Soccer City.

Mangena said the team is on site doing repairs.

“Unfortunately no ETR [estimated time of repair] has been given, but we are hoping to finish with the repairs by early evening. We apologise to the affected customers,” said Mangena.

Meanwhile, the City of Tshwane said "illegal protest action" is causing prolonged delays to the city’s ability to respond to the outages affecting some areas.

Spokesperson Selby Bokaba said they were addressing service delivery blockages to clear the backlogs.

“The city activated a joint operations centre (JOC) this morning [Wednesday] to respond to these disruptions, with members of the Tshwane metro police department and SAPS deployed across the municipality. The striking workers have blocked non-striking employees from performing their duties and intimidating those who want to do their work.”

Bokaba said employees had been told not to participate in the strike and return to work as the protest is illegal.

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