Ford hopeful to restart production after Tshwane pylon collapse
The president of Ford Motor Company Africa, Neale Hill, says the widespread power outage across various parts of Tshwane, has led to losses amounting to millions of rands at its Silverton Plant in Waltloo.
Vast parts of the capital were left in the dark after 132KV powerlines collapsed onto the N4 highway in the east of Tshwane on Sunday night.
The Waltloo area – where the Ford Plant is located - has been one such area suffered a complete outage.
The plant was forced to close, with the 4 500 strong work force having to stay home for two days and leading to an output loss of 720 vehicles per day.
Power was restored via a back feed since Tuesday and Hill says they hope to restart production on Thursday.
"Every day that we lose in productions it means that it is 720 vehicles that we don't produce, in the last two days is just shy of 1500 vehicles and probably in average value of R500 000 a vehicle, you can see the magnitude of the financial impact of the company.
"We are slowly but surely bringing systems back online. In particular, we have some very high voltage systems that we are concerned could potentially trip the grid at the plant that have high energy usage."
Hill says the plant produces Ford Ranger, VW Amarok models under contract for Volkswagen for customers not only in South Africa but in America, Europe, Korea, Africa and the Middle East amongst others.
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