The City of Johannesburg says water will be restored to most areas affected by outages as a result of a substation that caught fire on Monday.

Fire erupted at a substation in Eikenhof‚ south of Johannesburg‚ plunging parts of the city into darkness and interrupting water supplies to numerous areas.

“We are currently pumping water to our reservoirs. We have restored water to some areas‚ including Orlando‚” said MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Nico de Jager on Wednesday.

Other areas where water has already been restored include Radiokop‚ Weltevredenpark‚ Wilgeheuwel and surrounding areas.

“We will have water restored to most‚ if not all‚ areas by 6pm [on Wednesday]‚ even if it is at a reduced rate.”

De Jager said a lot of work had gone into making sure that power and water were restored in all affected areas since the substation caught fire.

“A lot of people have been working behind the scenes. When I went to the site yesterday [Tuesday]‚ there were about 40 people on site. Physical workers keep relieving each other because the work that goes into releasing transformers is immense.”

“This has been amazing. The work that would have taken weeks to do‚ was done in 72 hours. This is because from July 1‚ at the start of the new financial year‚ we started spending money on refurbishing old transformers.”

He said the city aims at refurbishing 55 transformers by the end of the next financial year. “Some transformers are quite old‚” De Jager said.