Eskom mum on Cairn/Burnside power outages
According to Philna de Kock, a resident of the area, she has experienced consistent issues when trying to reach Eskom telephonically as well as via email.
MBOMBELA – Following repeated appeals to Eskom to tend to persistent power outages in the Cairn/Burnside area, a paying customer was told that it will only be able to respond to queries and complaints on March 1.
According to Philna de Kock, a resident of the area, she has experienced consistent issues when trying to reach Eskom telephonically as well as via email.
“Outages happen at least once a week, whether there are thunderstorms or not,” said De Kock. On January 4 the area was hit by an unplanned power outage which lasted four hours. There was no communication from Eskom regarding the reasons for the outage or when residents can expect the electricity to be reconnected.
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To add insult to injury she recently received a generic email response from Eskom which stated the following:
“Dear valued Eskom customer. Thank you for your email, kindly note that the Eskom email service channel is temporarily unavailable and will resume on 1st March 2018. Eskom regrets any inconvenience caused. In the interim, kindly make use of our alternate service-channel options.”
“The situation has become serious, bordering on ridiculous,” De Kock said. She added that one of her greatest concerns is that due to a lack of maintenance on the Marathon substation which services the area, household appliances and borehole pumps are being damaged.
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Because the residents of Cairn and Burnside live in a rural area, she said the pricing per kilowatt hours is higher than in urban areas.
“We also have to run up costs for frequent telephone reporting and replacing or repairing damaged appliances.”
In spite of the regular unplanned and unannounced outages, the residents are required to pay network and administration charges, network- capacity and -demand charges, as well as ancillary service charges.
“These costs add up to about half of the monthly Eskom account,” De Kock said.
Despite attempts to gather a response from Eskom regarding the outages as well as its lack of response, the power utility did not provide comment by the time of going to press.
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