According to the Canadian company, cooling water entered the furnace at its Tsumeb processing facility because the back-up power and water-cooling systems did not come on line as expected, which affected the integrity of the lining. The replacement is expected to take three weeks.
This outage is expected to reduce 2016 concentrate throughput by approximately 20,000 tonnes. The vast majority of the costs associated with repairing the physical damage are expected to be covered through the company's insurance programme.
The response taken by operations management during this event ensured that no one was placed at risk during the outage. A full investigation is currently being led by Tsumeb's management.
This is the third major blackout in Namibia this year, and Nampower, the country’s energy utility, says the Auas/Kokerboom 400kV line, one of the major transmission lines that feeds power to the central parts of Namibia, tripped.
Last month, most of Namibia was left without electricity for 20 minutes when the Aries/Kokerboom line - Namibia's main route for electricity from Eskom tripped. While in April, most parts of the country also experienced a power outage for about two hours during the commissioning of generator two (one of four generators) at the Ruacana Power Station in the Kunene Region, a report in The Namibian says.
