Residents and business owners in Monument Park, Waterkloof Ridge, Erasmusrand, and surrounding areas in the east say they have reached breaking point after being left without electricity for up to two weeks following storms.

The prolonged outages affecting entire streets, embassies, and dozens of small businesses have triggered threats of protest action as frustration, losses, and safety concerns intensify.

Small business owner Leona Maritz said the impact has been devastating.

“We’ve been without electricity for four full days, more than 96 hours, and we had regular outages before that. My business runs completely on electricity.”

Maritz said she had to throw away ingredients, cancel orders and burn thousands of rand a day on a generator that only keeps the lights on.

She said this blackout is emotionally and financially exhausting.

“Residents are throwing out spoiled food, families can’t cook, and people are coming to my shop just to charge their phones. Everyone is tired, helpless and frustrated.”

Maritz said technicians have offered little reassurance, and the job card keeps being passed around.

According to Maritz, they have seen technicians sitting in their vehicles near the broken cables and leaving without repairing anything.

“There’s been no leadership, no accountability, and no progress.”

A homeowner on Brooks Street, Cobus Visagie, shared the same concerns.

He said the problems began long before the blackout.

“We had major fluctuations on Wednesday, then the power went off [on] November 20 and has been off since,” he said.

“They came to restore a broken cable, but did not fix the trip on the distribution box outside 338 Brooks Street.”

According to Visagie, the box distributes power to three homes and is the one that keeps tripping.

Ward 42 councillor Shane Maas said the scale of the outages was initially misidentified.

“Normally, such outages are a block outage caused by a minisub or substation tripping,” said Maas.

He said on the morning of November 26, it became clear they were dealing with an inordinately high number of single outages where the supply tripped at the pole of each affected property.

Maas added that he escalated more than 30 outages that day and more than 15 the following day, with ‘zero feedback’ from the department.

“Teams restored power at one property but left the house next door off because it wasn’t on their list. This speaks to terrible and inefficient planning.”

Metro spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said the prolonged outages were caused by multiple medium-voltage cable faults, storm-related damage and fallen trees damaging overhead infrastructure.

He said these conditions slowed fault-finding and repair work.

Mashigo confirmed that limited staff, vehicles, and tools, combined with an ‘unusually high volume’ of storm-related outages, had stretched resources.

“Teams were prioritised for major block faults to restore supply to the greatest number of customers.

“This resulted in delays in allocating artisans to some single-property issues,” he said.

He added that all affected customers, including embassies and high-security facilities, are receiving updates through regional communication platforms.

However, residents say communication remains poor, and progress is painfully slow.

Mashigo said claims for losses may be submitted through the city’s formal liability process.

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