Technician injured in flashover at Johannesburg substation

What happened

City Power reported that a team working at the Crown substation in Johannesburg experienced a flashover from the busbar area on Wednesday 16 March 2022. A technician was injured and taken to hospital, where he was receiving treatment. The flashover caused an outage at the substation that affected four distributors supplying the Ormonde View, Booysens Reserve, Therta and Soccer City areas. City Power said the cause was under investigation. At the time of reporting, no estimated time of repair had been given. The repair team remained on site and hoped to finish by early evening.

Contributing factors

City Power had not established the cause of the flashover at the time of reporting, and said it was being investigated. The source does not say what work the team was carrying out at the busbar.

Lessons learned

1. Confirm isolation, earthing and clearance from busbar areas before work starts, and re-verify them when work changes.
2. Assess arc flash risk for live or adjacent switchgear and require protective equipment matched to that risk.
3. Where an outage affects several feeders, give customers a restoration estimate early and update it, even if the estimate is uncertain.

More lessons on electrical protection and isolation, worker safety and safe systems of work, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

sowetan.co.za