Residents of Heidelberg and Ratanda were left in the dark on August 11 after a town-wide electricity outage. The outage affected households, businesses, schools and clinics across Heidelberg, Ratanda and Jameson Park.

Residents reported spoiled food, lost trading hours and safety concerns due to non-working streetlights and traffic lights.

Lesedi Local Municipality confirmed the outage on its official social media page and said that their technicians have been notified of the electrical fault from the Eskom side again.

Eskom had dispatched its technicians to assess the situation. This fault is affecting electricity supply to the Jameson Park, Heidelberg, and Ratanda substations.

The outage comes a week after Lesedi Local Municipality issued a public notice on August 3 announcing load reduction measures across the municipality.

According to the notice, load reduction runs from August 5 to October daily between 17:00 and 20:30 for three hours and 30 minutes.

The municipality attributed the measures to high electricity demand during peak hours and network strain caused by illegal connections and electricity bypassing capacity limitations within the local distribution system.

Some of the residents lamented that the combination of unplanned outages and scheduled load reduction is crippling. Lazarus Mokoena (46) said, “When there’s no power we don’t trade, but rent, stock and wages still need to be paid.

“This is not just about one day without power because we have been complaining about it to the municipality several times. We need a long-term solution and I feel that the current leadership has completely failed us,” he said.

Sheila Mofokeng (41) said, “We woke up to no power and spent the whole day waiting. Some of the children could not even attend school today because they cannot use cold water in this weather. We deserve better communication because they will need our votes soon,” she said.