13 suburbs without electricity as ‘disrespectful’ City Power deals with more than 800 calls

City Power said it’s experiencing electricity issues at several substations in Randburg, Roodepoort and surrounding areas on Monday.

Customers took to Twitter during the early morning hours to report outages with the first batch of blackouts flagged in Darrenwood and Cresta at 4am.

At the time, City Power “[apologised] profusely for the inconvenience caused to residents in Windsor, Cresta, Darrenwood, Robindale, Linden, Randpark Ridge and Blackheath.

The cause of the outage was due to “an Eskom fault and a vandalised transformer”. The power was restored two hours later when Eskom attended to the fault.

Then, in two separate incidents reported at 7:30 am, City Power technicians responded to an outage in Randpark Ridge and Alexandra.

At 9am, an outage was reported in Selby and Ferreira’s Dorp.

Fifteen minutes later, another outage also affected residents in Fleurhof, Weltevreden Park and Allensnek.

While the cause of most of the faults could not be established immediately, the outage in Fleurhof was due to suspected cable theft.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said technicians had to deal with more than 800 calls, and approximately 400 of those were logged during the past 24 hours.

“The area with the most call includes Randburg, which had a huge outage last night at the Windsor substation”.

He said the faults had since been resolved, and technicians are now attending to “localised problems after the outage”.

“Roodepoort, Hurtshill are also affected as we also lost Cydna substation this morning which affects Illovo, Melrose and Athol. We suspect cable fault”.

The responses from City Power are plainly disrespectful. They talk down to residents (who are their paying customers). City Power needs to be disbanded and put back under the CoJ. Why have all these COO and CEO if there is no value add. We see them at the photo opportunities only

— ActionSA: Joburg – Ward 97 (@Ward97S) March 28, 2022

Additional technicians were sent to the field in an attempt to clear out the backlog of no-service calls.

Current electricity outages

At the time of publishing, residents in 13 neighbourhoods are still in the dark:

• Park Central
• Fleurhof
• Village Main
• Newtown
• New Centre
• City and Suburban areas
• Wemmer and surrounding areas
• Fairway
• Winstone Ridge
• Elton Hill Ext 3
• Melrose North
• Kentview
• Illovo Ext 1

#FordsburgOutage #CentralOutage

City Power is attending to an outage from #Fordsburg Substation affecting most of the #Joburg CBD and #Selby. ^MM pic.twitter.com/ZLD1aCaqWQ

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) March 28, 2022

#RoodepoortOutage

Operators have been send off to attend to the outages at #Fluerhof and #Christiaan De Wet. ^MM pic.twitter.com/SpiA8ZG2RD

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) March 28, 2022

#CydnaOutage

Power is fully restored to customers affected. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. ^MM pic.twitter.com/4NbGLg6mhb

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) March 28, 2022

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