I read about the Table Mountain cable car coming to a halt due to power cuts and leaving people stranded. My husband and I are flying to Cape Town in April and I'd like to know if this is now an ongoing risk when going to the top of Table Mountain? Rosemary Holden, Warwick

Sunday Times travel expert Richard Green responds: There are of a lot of bad places to be stuck during a power cut, but it doesn't get much worse than dangling in a cable car 2,300ft above the ground.

But you are right, it did happen, on January 21, when several dozen people were trapped for hours in the gondolas and 900 or so tourists were marooned on the top of the mountain. The cars ground to a standstill a short distance from the off loading areas - relatively lucky for those people near the base station, but terrifying for people in the car at the top of the ascent.

People in the top gondola even had to climb out through an emergency exit in the roof, before negotiating two yards crawling on a horizontal ladder to safety.

However, while there is an ongoing risk of running into a power cut anywhere in South Africa over the next few years - due to shortfalls in supply and rapidly growing demand - riding up to Table Mountain should again be trouble free.

The cable car company has contacted Eskom (the national power firm) to improve procedures, as it claims not have been given any notice of the outage. Also the back-up generator, which failed to function properly, has been looked at. When Cape Town was hit with another big blackout on February 1 (five and a half hours long), the cars continued running safely on back-up power.

In fact the January 21 incident was the first of its kind in the cable car's 78-year history. Oh, and don't let that date shock you - the current technology, and the rotating gondolas, were installed in 1997.

For information on the cable car, visit www.tablemountain.net, and to keep an eye on the general situation, check out the plucky www.blackout.co.za

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