“Mix-up” leaves Glendale resident without power for seven days

Eskom has described the dilemma of a Glendale resident losing R5 000 worth of food and spending more than R1 000 on airtime to have a lightning-struck breaker seen to, a ‘mix up’.

Tracy Koekemoer’s festive season turned into a week-long nightmare.

Unbeknown to her at the time, she would wait 7 days for the breaker to be repaired, which she claims Eskom told her had been fixed after she reported it the first time.

In the days that followed the outage on December 30, Tracy and her 67-year-old mother attempted to contact Eskom on its shareline, only to be disconnected on a number of occasions after “waiting for hours” for the phone call to be transferred to an agent.

At one point, they were the 382nd caller in the queue.

The mom of two rents accommodation on a farm inland from Monkeyland, and said she and her children were frightened spending the nights in darkness.

“My children have seen the news. We were without power for 7 days and they know about farm murders. We did not feel safe at all,” she said.

Reaching out to a number of ward councillors across the iLembe district, Koekemoer said she finally reached someone who could escalate the matter.

Their power was restored on January 6 around midday.

Eskom spokesperson Joyce Zingoni said Koekemoer must have experienced an isolated fault occurring after an unplanned network fault had been resolved in the area.

Parts of Glendale went dark after severe storms, inundating Eskom’s shareline with calls to report outages.

“When the network fault was resolved, the customer must then have experienced an isolated fault. However, given that the reference number was linked to the network fault, this resulted in the customer being told that the fault had been fixed,” said Zingoni.

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