City Power has strongly condemned what it called ‘the growing incidents of threats, intimidation and hostage situations’ involving their technicians as they carry out critical repair and maintenance work across various areas.

According to Midrand Reporter, power entity spokesperson Isaac Mangena said in recent weeks the Midrand Service Delivery Centre (SDC) has experienced a worrying rise in such incidents.

He said most notably, community members from Kanana Extensions 4 and 5 yesterday stormed the Midrand SDC, blocked the gates for several hours and disrupted operations by preventing technicians from attending to an outage in the area.

“Last night [July 10], City Power technicians responded to an outage in the area and discovered the fault was linked to a problem on the overhead line, an issue that could only be safely addressed during the day. The task was then handed over to the day-shift team. However, while our teams were preparing to conduct the repairs and sourcing the necessary materials, community members blocked the gates and refused to let them leave the SDC,” said Mangena.

He added that this further delayed the process of repair work in that area as well as in others.

Mangena said on the same day a team of electricians dispatched to Rabie Ridge were held hostage and threatened by residents, only being released after intervention from their Security Risk team.

“Two weeks ago, services to Mayibuye had to be suspended for nearly a week after technicians were similarly threatened and held hostage while attempting to conduct legitimate maintenance work in the area, including work to normalise the area by installing prepaid meters. Another incident occurred about three weeks ago in Klipfontein, where City Power technicians and a contractor were held hostage at a substation during a power outage,” added Mangena.

He said due to these continued safety risks, City Power has decided to temporarily suspend services in Kanana Extensions 4 and 5, where technicians can no longer operate safely.

“We will continue to monitor the situation and will only resume work once it is safe to do so,” concluded Mangena.

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