Angry residents petition Tshwane to end power outages
Residents are at the end of their tether in Menlo Park, Maroelana and Hazelwood with power outages and have now put a petition together which will be tabled in council.
Within eight hours, more than 180 people signed a petition asking Tshwane to take immediate steps to stop recurring power outages or trips in the Hazelwood, Menlo Park and Maroelana areas.
The petition, drawn up by Duart Booysen, also demands that the metro be transparent about the causes of these outages to residents.
Local ward councillor Siobhan Muller will deliver it to the Sections 79 Petitions Committee at the next Tshwane council meeting on February 27.
Recently three suburbs were intermittently without electricity not attributable to load-shedding from February 1 to 5.
Outages in the past year have led to residents and businesses moving out of these suburbs.
Residents told Rekord they do not believe that all of these outages can be attributed to cable theft because they occur within an hour every day.
“We do not buy the cable theft excuse every time anymore and believe there are other underlying causes which are not addressed and that is why these suburbs are regularly still experiencing these outages. Causes such as the system being overloaded and the infrastructure being old, rather than cable theft, can be where the problem lies. We are tired of hearing it can all be attributed to cable theft,” said resident Paul Joubert.
He said that this is one of the reasons why residents speculate about the reasons.
“Residents and councillors often have to explain the network and its working to the experts and contractors sent out by the metro,” remarked Joubert.
He also said when residents ask contractors and metro staff for an explanation, they are often responded to with a bad attitude.
According to Joubert, recently the metro had to repair cables under 17th Street but never filled the trench so cars driving over it are causing further damage to the cables.
Requests to the metro and contractors to cover the cables properly are being ignored, according to Joubert.
Muller told Rekord the recent outage on February 1 ended at 02:00 the following day only for the system to trip again almost immediately.
It became apparent that during the suddenly announced load-shedding, cables were indeed stolen on The Hillside near Atterbury Road, as well as on Justice Mahomed and Thomas Edison streets.
This impaired the substation feeding into Maroelana, Hazelwood and the bottom end of Menlo Park.
“The times these outages are happening are not the same even though there is a conspiracy theory going around that they do occur at 10:00 regularly,” said Muller.
She also explained that as load-shedding runs per the announced schedule, it is easy for cable thieves to time their activities to when it is dark.
Muller said there was indeed a delay in the restoration after the weekend of February 1.
She said the cable was only replaced on February 3 but the system tripped again in Hazelwood, Maroelana and Menlo Park after a few hours and again the next day when it was restored.
Muller said: ” To me, there is a persistent problem in a ring that runs from Lynnwood South into Menlo Park, Hazelwood and Maroelana. The contractors and staff are not finding the problem why the power is going off in this ring and can give us no information on that.”
Muller said residents are angry. “The metro has to find the root of the problem. You cannot keep on flicking a switch at a substation in the hope there will be no outage.”
The metro was asked for comment but none had been received at the time of publication.
– Link to the petition:
https://www.petitions.net/repeat_outages_in_menlo_park_lynnwood_south_maroelana_and_hazelwood_must_be_investigated
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