Second blackout in two months

A SECOND power blackout in two months hit most of the country yesterday afternoon. NamPower blamed it on an outage that caused the Aries/Kokerboom 400 kiloVolt line from Eskom in South Africa to trip.

This is the main line which feeds power from Eskom into Namibia. According to NamPower, this affected other transmission lines as well as two generators at the Ruacana and Van Eck power stations. “The cause of the outage is not yet known, and is being investigated. Power supply to the affected areas was restored in phases, with the central areas being the first to be restored at 13h44,” NamPower said in a statement. NamPower corporate communications and marketing manager Tangeni Kambangula said power supply had been restored to the whole country by late yesterday.