A PROLONGED power outage at the weekend, following recent loadshedding, was the last straw for residents and business owners in Glenwood who sat without any electiricty from around midday on Friday, 15 February until 5.30am on Sunday, 17 February.
According to ward councillor Mmabatho Tembe, the Electricity Department informed her that the reason behind the major outage was that 20 substations in and around the Glenwood area were down.
“For as long as I have been a councillor, I have never heard of so many substations being out in the area. When I spoke to the Head of the Electricity Department on the weekend follwoing numerous complaints from residents, I was told that the department was working on each substation one at a time. I had to inform residents that workers were on the ground working as fast as they could,” she said, adding that residents and businesses in the area had been negatively affected by the outage.
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Owners of local business Mooki Noodle Bar, Paul and Charisse Boshoff, said they usually experienced loadshedding between 2pm and 4pm on a Friday, and had two batteries and an inverter to run point of sale and lights, but when the power went off at noon and didn’t come back on again, they were concerned and contacted the municipality. They said the batteries were not powerful enough to keep their fridges running.
“There are six businesses in our building and a restaurant and barber over the road from us, and we were all affected. When there is no power, we can’t keep on opening and closing our fridges so we worked until 5.30pm and then had to cancel our 15 dinner bookings. At 9pm we called eThekwini and were told the outage was due to a cable fault and 70 per cent power to the substations which were off-line had been restored, although they couldn’t give us a timeframe. As a restaurant, we lost a lot of stock and prepared food,” said Charisse.
“We are now doing minimal shopping. You cannot run a hygienic kitchen without refrigeration and we are taking precautions in case this happens again. For us it is a loss of sales and we also had to disappoint customers,” said Paul, adding that staff were also affected as they could not work and therefore were not paid. “We don’t know what to do anymore. This is severe for a small business,” said Paul. He said he also found it frustrating that there was no form of official communication to the public regarding the outage.
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Glenwood resident, Nicole Rimensberger, said she was quite badly affected. “I didn’t have power for 41 hours! I’d just been grocery shopping on Thursday, so I lost a lot of food. I did manage to save some items from the freezer when by Saturday afternoon the power still hadn’t come on and I took some to my parents’ home. My security and access to the property was compromised as well because the back-up batteries for the gate and electric fence aren’t meant to last that long. The first night was okay, but by night two it was a bit more depressing. I really hope that this doesn’t happen again,” she said.
Local schools also expressed their concerns over the recent loadshedding, which affected the children’s day at school.
Carol De Matteis from Clifton College said besides the obvious inconveniences of poor lighting and temperature control during load shedding, teaching was also affected.
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“Much of our learning takes place using technology and many resources are accessed by staff and pupils via a cloud-based portal. Our server can be kept running for a short time, however its capacity is severely reduced during extended power outages. When it has to be shut down, the telephone switchboard also shuts down, impacting on communication with parents. We manage as best we can and use these ‘technology downtimes’ to explore other creative ways of teaching with our boys. It certainly does make one aware of the advancement of technology usage in the classroom,” she said.
Noel Ingle, principal at Glenwood Preparatory School said loadshedding largely affected the school administration.
“Effective teaching still takes place, but the school is nevertheless looking at alternatives to remain fully functional during loadshedding. We have investigated the upgrading of our generator to keep larger parts of the school with power. We are also looking at solar power both as a renewable source and a back up source of electricity.”
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