City Power’s ‘bandage’ response angers residents!

IT HAS been almost five days since some parts of Joburg have been plunged into darkness.

These areas have been without electricity since Friday, 12 April, and many residents still lack power in this cold weather.

Among those areas that have been highly affected was Roodepoort after a tree fell on the transmission lines.

Areas such as Horizon, Horizon View, Florida Park, Georgia, Roodekraans, Wilropark, Allen’s Nek, Heldekruin, Eagle Canyon, Ruimsig, Wilgeheuwel, Constantia Kloof, Strubens Valley, Weltevredenpark, and Honeydew are also affected.

While City Power has confirmed that technicians have been sent to attend to the outages and repairs, it was revealed that the cold weather has set the teams back.

“The cold weather shot the demand higher, and our systems are starting to overload as they feel constrained in some areas. The demand for material moves faster than what we can replenish,” City Power spokesman Isaac Mangena said.

According to Mangena, the current number of outage calls sits at about 3 700, of which most of them are from the Roodepoort area.

Roodepoort has been affected mainly by outages around Honey Park due to cable theft attempts and infrastructure vandalism.

But Mangena emphasised that the team has not grown wary of these issues and will remain on the ground to resolve them.

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While City Power released an apology for the prolonged outages, residents are now fed up with the city’s bandage response to these power outage issues.

Speaking to Daily Sun Ward Councillor at Northcliff in Randburg, Nicolene Jonker said they, too, were affected by power outages resulting in a trip that later affected the water tower.

Although power was restored and later allowed the water tower to pump water, Jonker said the city sits with old infrastructure that needs to be updated.

“Infrastructure is not being upgraded. Residents feel like they are paying a lot for services they don't have. Our water and electricity pipes that were laid in the '60s have not been upgraded. This cannot be,” she said.

According to Jonker, the entity should not wait until the substation blows up before they replace it but must actively maintain the system.

Mangena told Daily Sun that they noted outages in the Hursthill areas, affecting areas such as Northcliff and Westbury where faulty transformers and cables are an issue.

He urged the public to also play an active role in dealing with capacity and overloading.

“Customers must reduce consumption of electricity and unplug heavy equipment to save electricity and deal with capacity and overloading; otherwise, we will have this issue of blowing up of mini substation and cables,” he said.