Another Dinwiddie resident left in the dark
Colin Wedel, who is a pensioner, said he had visited the energy department in Germiston and called CoE to seek assistance.
The City of Ekurhuleni (CoE) said it is clearing the backlog on reported electricity interruptions in Germiston, but residents continue to worry about turnaround time in resolving these issues.
Zweli Dlamini, the city spokesperson, said the energy department acknowledged that several power outages have occurred in Germiston.
“These were mostly as a result of severe weather conditions on October 2. Teams have been attending to this influx in complaints. The backlog was eradicated by October 10 and only a few reported incidents on the system remain,” said Dlamini.
A Dinwiddie resident told GCN on October 13 he had been without power for eight days.
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Colin Wedel, who is a pensioner, said he had visited the energy department in Germiston and called CoE to seek assistance.
“My switch from the mini-sub station was stolen.
“If I had one I would replace it myself but that is illegal. I am the only one without electricity,” said Wedel.
When asked how the issue affects him, he replied, “I am a pensioner, I just lost my wife a couple of months ago due to cancer. Having no electricity makes things difficult for me. I cannot even charge my phone, I can’t do the simplest things.
“I had to throw away some food that was in the fridge. My security is also compromised.”
Dlamini said the department continues to attend to new complaints as and when received.
“A high number of calls were received since October 2. Normally this indicates an area outage stemming from a single cause on the electrical network. The department can usually isolate such network faults and communicate estimate restoration times,” said Dlamini.
“In this case, we were dealing with multiple individual faults across the electrical distribution network. It is difficult to provide expected restoration times for each complaint as the severity and complexity of each incident may vary.”
Contact the newsroom by emailing:
Marietta Lombard (Editor) germistoncitynews@caxton.co.za, or (Journalists) Busi Vilakazi busiv@caxton.co.za
