Bryanston and its plonky power
BRYANSTON- When four ward councillors spearhead a public meeting to discuss power outages, you know something is up. Or is that off?
According to Ward 103’s Vincent Earp, Ward 104’s Mike Wood and young gun councillors Stephen Moore from Ward 106 and David Potter from Ward 102, Bryanston has been hard hit with ongoing outages, and has little by way of a plan forward to ensure outages are dealt with lickety-split.
All four have put the blame on City Power.
Spokesman Louis Pieterse from the city’s power supplier was invited to speak at the meeting on 1 July. Pieterse did not pitch. He was dealing with outages plaguing Lenasia on the night.
“Pieterse knows the system, and is the perfect man to discuss issues,” Potter said.
Potter and his cohorts maintain that a solid relationship with the good apples at City Power ensures that at least some problems are dealt with swiftly, but was just as disappointed that the department was not able to explain its challenges to peeved residents in person.
Unfortunately, as a lot was said on Bryanston and it’s surrounds’ problems.
Wood said Bryanston was an interesting suburb as it is shared by four councillors, and unplanned outages was getting on the nerves of the four and residents.
Moore explained that a recent four-day outage was so severe that it effected residents with medical conditions.
Earp and residents added that outages have now led to safety concerns.
Besides alarm systems back-up power supplies being unable to cope with extended outages, no lights mean other safety precautions such as CCTV feeds, electric fences and spotlights were not working.
Reasons for outages have been blamed on cable theft and failing infrastructure.
Earp said the city has gone to the length of stamping its copper cables and habitually raid scrapyards to crack down the problem of cable theft, but it remained a doozy for the city.
The way forward also seemed fragmented.
From a small budget that cannot ensure new infrastructure, logging issues and trouble claiming damages from the city, none of the councillors can give complete ease of mind that everything will get better, except for Bryanston’s ace up its sleeve – the Kelvin power station.
With mine workers back at their posts, an estimated 400mw of power is added to South Africa’s grid the potential of loadshedding from this added strain is real.
Bryanston should be safe from loadshedding schedules due to Kelvin power station not being owned by Eskom. Perhaps a silver lining of the very dark cloud of power outages.
