Load shedding leaves 500 tourists trapped on Table Mountain
A power outage at Cape Town's top tourist destination Table Mountain left at least 500 tourists stranded on Monday evening.
According to Wahida Parker, MD of Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company, the recurring bouts of load shedding led to a failure in the generators.
Yesterday power utility Eskom announced that it will implement stage 6 load shedding for the first time.
"What happened was our generator malfunctioned and the cause of the generator malfunctioning is the cause of these continuous power surges going on going off.
"We had to wait for the electricity to come back on which was at 18H30 to bring people down the mountain. At that stage we had already taken the decision not to take any more people up because we were then informed stage 6 of load shedding would come into play," says Parker.
Read: a statement from our #Cableway MD @Wahidaparker regarding the #loadshedding incident at the top of #tablemountain last night: https://t.co/TKZi1JEnav pic.twitter.com/waqmIqo4R9
— Table Mountain C/Way (@TableMountainCa) December 10, 2019
Parker says they have since met with the City of Cape Town to discuss ways to mitigate further disruptions to tourist activity.
"I've just returned from a meeting with the City of Cape Town where they are looking into assisting us in various ways in order to ensure the attraction remains open."
She adds that in the event of stage 8 load shedding, the company will have to reconsider the use of a generator.
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