East residents demand utility bill discounts after long outages

Residents of Garsfontein are calling on the metro to charge them utility bills pro rata following a week-long power outage that disrupted their daily lives.

To add insult to injury the residents also experienced water outages, hence their demand for this relief.

The residents said the power outages had disrupted their daily lives, further leading to safety concerns.

In January alone, the residents said they have experienced power outages for a total of nine days.

Resident Mariette Swanepoel said residents had experienced electricity issues since January 14.

“There is no proper maintenance of infrastructure, but they just temporarily fix a current supply problem.”

She stressed that a few days later, another problem would occur, leading to an outage in the area.

She said a failure to properly maintain infrastructure long-term resulted in contractors returning to fix the same problem over and over.
Swanepoel said this was the metro self-sabotaging because it has to pay for the same thing repeatedly.

“There should be a way to get pro-rata discount from Tshwane on rates and taxes when without power or water. The service and repair time is pathetic,” she said.

She said she was considering moving away from Garsfontein.

“This has been the case ever since I moved to Garsfontein four years ago, but at the moment the problems with power outages and water supply are just escalating.”

She said by January 17, her freezer had defrosted and the meat had gone bad. Other goods such as ice cream and milk also went sour in the process.

“Now I have to throw out the rotten meat, and its loss of money.”

Swanepoel said safety was also a costly battle after her batteries for the alarm systems were depleted.

“Our Wi-Fi has been off, the inverter battery also went off. It’s impossible to plan cooking and washing.”

She said their quality of life had deteriorated due to the reoccurring power outages.

“Either no water or no electricity or both at the same time are off. We can’t use a washing machine or dishwasher, can’t shower or bath. It’s been like this constantly for nine days in January,” she said.

She added that the water and electricity infrastructure in Garsfontein has not been properly maintained in the past few years.

“Why should we pay rates and taxes on time while the services we get are so poor?”

Ward councillor Elizabeth Basson acknowledged the service delivery issues faced in Garsfontein.

“Currently there are real service delivery challenges in my ward.”

She said the power outages west of Solomon Mahlangu Drive, were every two weeks and then once a week but this past week, the power went out three times or 36 to 50 hours collectively due to cable faults.

Basson said since Thursday, there have been 16 pipe bursts in 11 days affecting Garsfontein Ext 3, 6 and 8.

“This is creating a crisis for these residents as they cannot plan or continue with their daily activities.”

She said the power issue has become unbearable.

“Very often residents are without water and power the situation is becoming unbearable. A long-term solution needs to be implemented as soon as possible to stabilise the pressure in the pipes and to do a complete pipe replacement in this area as it has been requested on the IDP since 2022.”

She said electricity and water infrastructure needs to be maintained.

“Garsfontein Substation needs to be refurbished and effective security installed to prevent new vandalism.”

Basson said this will stabilise the network so that when there is a fault only one panel trips out of the 12 and not all 12.

“This will drastically reduce the power challenges faced by the residents in Garsfontein, west of Solomon Mahlangu.”

Basson said she would escalate all the infrastructure matters to the MMC so that they could be made a priority.

The metro said the week-long power outages were caused by faulty cables.

Spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said inclement weather caused the persistent power outages.

He said the interruption of this essential service is caused by a natural phenomenon.

Mashigo said the infrastructure has aged and needed refurbishment but due to budget constraints, the metro can only react to outages.

“To mitigate these constant outages, all abnormalities (faulty medium cables/equipment) on the network must be attended to timeously. In this case, the depot [metro] ensured that all the faulty medium cables were repaired, and power was restored to all the affected consumers in that area.”

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