Crestholme residents left in the dark
The eThekwini Municipality says the power outages in the area are due to numerous illegal connections.
FED up with the intermittent supply of electricity to the Crestholme area, a local resident, Sonja Clark, hopes that by highlighting the ongoing power issues, her effort will spark a change.
Clark has lived in the area since 2018 and has kept all correspondence with the Electricity Department since March 2019.
“We have had so many power outages since then and it seemed to have improved during the hard lockdown. We seem to have more power failures than most and it seems to be getting worse and worse. The biggest problem is trying to report an outage, if you are fortunate enough to get through,” she said.
Her average wait time to report an outage is 30 minutes and noted the longest time she sat on hold was two-and-a-half hours. “There are many times you call and it says the number does not exist,” said Clark.
Utilising the WhatsApp line to report faults, Clark noted that her recent messages have not yet been read.
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“When the power goes out here we become sitting ducks. Our neighbour has been hit 14 times when we have power outages. The electric fences are out, the cellphone towers in the area goes down, there is no cellphone signal and our alarm batteries die. We can’t call out, nothing works. We can’t receive or make calls. You can’t cope,” she said.
On June 28 the power went out at 02:28, she called immediately, received a reference number and the power was restored by 05:58. Two days later the power went out at about the same time and the issue was reported at 02:42. She received an SMS to confirm the fault was logged. Throughout the day she called the Electricity Department and her tenants were encouraged to do so as well. They all received the same reference number.
“We were not even on the list of areas with an outage. We drove through the whole area looking for a vehicle repairing a fault and there wasn’t one. A large percentage of us work from home, and many of us lost a whole day of work,” said Clark, who noted the power to the area was only restored by 17:00 that evening. “If we are paying for it, the least they can do is to make sure it is functional.”
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eThekwini Municipality’s spokesman, Msawakhe Mayisela, said, “When a reference is created by a call centre for a fault, the fault is automatically logged on the system. This reference number is then escalated to network control for investigation. The time taken to attend to a fault varies according to the severity of the damage. The time taken for staff to be dispatched is also dependent on the workload during that particular shift.
“Upon investigation of the references given, it was discovered that the area experienced a number of outages between April and June. This was traced back to illegal connections, which led to equipment failure.”
Mayisela noted the composition of equipment in Crestholme is mostly overhead mains and made the network susceptible to faults. The reason for faults included animals, vegetation and inclement weather.
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