A break-in at a power substation in Tamale left one man dead and cut electricity to parts of the city’s business district.
A man believed to be in his 30s has died from electrocution inside a substation belonging to the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo), the state power distributor that serves northern Ghana, after he allegedly broke in to remove metal parts.
The incident happened in the early hours of Saturday, October 24, at a substation in Tamale, the Northern Regional capital. It knocked out supply to parts of the city's central business district.
How the body was found
NEDCo's Northern Area Engineer, David Quarshie Doe, said the company only became aware that something was wrong when a major line feeding the town went off.
Speaking in an interview on Citi News monitored by The Ghana Report, Mr Doe said police had also reported hearing a loud bang coming from the substation's control room shortly before the outage.
NEDCo technicians were sent to the facility to find out what had gone wrong. Inside the control room, they found the man on the ground with visible signs of electrocution.
A closer check of the site showed that parts of the substation's equipment had been detached and packed into a bag. That discovery led officials to conclude the man had most likely entered the facility to steal the components.
Power restored, body removed
The fault left sections of Tamale's commercial centre without electricity, and NEDCo crews moved to restore supply to the affected areas.
Police have taken the body to the mortuary at Tamale Teaching Hospital. The man had not been publicly identified at the time of reporting, and the source report does not indicate whether a formal investigation has been opened.
Why this keeps happening
Theft of metal from electricity installations is a recurring problem for distribution companies in Ghana. Substations contain copper, aluminium and steel parts that can be sold as scrap, and thieves often target them at night when the facilities are unmanned.
The danger is extreme. Equipment inside a live substation carries voltages far higher than what runs through a household socket, and contact is usually fatal. Beyond the risk to life, every break-in can damage equipment that is costly to replace and leave whole neighbourhoods, shops and clinics without power until repairs are done.
For Ghanaians abroad who follow outages back home, incidents like this are part of the picture. Not every blackout is a generation shortfall or a national grid fault. Some are caused on the ground, at a single substation, by vandalism or theft.
NEDCo has in the past appealed to communities to report suspicious activity around its installations rather than approach them. The source report does not state whether any fresh appeal or security measure has been announced following Saturday's incident.
