Fourth fire at City Power substation leaves Marshalltown residents without power

What happened

A fourth fire broke out at City Power's Central substation in Marshalltown, in the Johannesburg CBD, overnight before Eyewitness News reported on 14 October 2026. The fire followed three earlier fires at the substation, which had caused consecutive outages in the suburb. Marshalltown is home to more than 4,000 residents, and some had been without electricity for more than two weeks. Electricity was restored to some residents on 8 October, but other parts of the suburb were still experiencing outages when the latest fire occurred. City Power said in an earlier statement that 90% of its infrastructure had been restored, with repairs under way in several surrounding areas.

Contributing factors

City Power suspects that cable theft and vandalism caused the month-long power outages in Marshalltown. A Centre for Development and Enterprise report attributed City Power's infrastructure failures more generally to maintenance backlogs and weak management. The cause of the fires at the substation is not stated in the source.

Lessons learned

1. Protect substation sites and cabling against theft and vandalism through physical security, perimeter monitoring and rapid replacement of stolen cable.
2. Repeated fires at the same site should trigger a formal root-cause review before restoration is treated as complete.
3. Keep affected customers informed with realistic restoration timelines, as prolonged uncertainty erodes public confidence in the utility.

More lessons on theft, arson and site security, outages, backup supply and restoration, from every incident on the register.

Source

ewn.co.za