City of Tshwane working to restore power in Pretoria east

The areas affected by the massive outages are Waterkloof, Waterkloof Ridge and Monument Park.

The City says the power failure was caused by private contractors who damaged cables in two places on Friday, while installing optic fibre cables.

Tshwane spokesperson Selby Bokaba says the teams worked throughout the night and were relieved by other teams, from this morning.

"According to the senior engineers on site 75 % of the area will be back on by 4pm today and power is expected to be restored in the entire area by 7pm, barring any rain disturbances. We have deployed senior engineers on site due to the magnitude of the problem," says Bokaba.

Bokaba says they are doing costing of the repairs so that they can hold the private contractors that damaged the cables financially liable for the damage caused by their negligence.