Local school left in the dark for several weeks
According to him it was a serious failure of the mandate of the Municipality and a failure to provide services to a key educational institution, especially one with more than 1 000 learners.
Recently huge concern surfaced after a local senior secondary school, Hoërskool Bastion, was left without electricity for more than two weeks.
According to the Democratic Alliance ward councillor and CEO of the West Rand Chamber of Business, Dennis Pretorius, a power failure occurred on the night of Monday, 19 March. The issue was allegedly reported to the emergency centre by the Community Policing Forum in Sector 9 that same evening
“At 7.30am the next morning, the maintenance staff gave attention to the complaint and power was diverted from the other side of the ring feed to the surrounding residences. However, Bastion could not be provided from that same ring feed,” he explained.
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“The school has been without electricity for almost three weeks. They were unable to issue report cards to their learners and were not able to update learner information to the Education Department via the internet. School activities came to a standstill.”
Dennis went on to say that even though he tried to communicate with Mogale City’s Municipal Manager via emails and phone-calls, he did not receive any feedback.
According to him it was a serious failure of the mandate of the Municipality and a failure to provide services to a key educational institution, especially one with more than 1 000 learners.
“I am sure it was also a failure to comply with the conditions of their Electricity Distribution Licence issued in terms of the Electricity Regulation Act 4 of 2006,” he said.
Even though the electricity was restored again on Saturday, 7 April, Dennis would like to stress the fact that the municipality failed to provide any feedback or service within a period of 19 days. This ultimately resulted in the school being left in the dark for almost three weeks, which, Dennis added, hopefully won’t happen again.
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