Resident tells of his struggles without power and difficult communication with City Power
After the power cables were stolen, a resident had to struggle for eight days with back-and-forth communication between him and the power entity to try and have the issue resolved.
After struggling for eight days without power, a resident of 13th Street is concerned it might happen again.
‘Eight days of hell’ is how Bertus Lombard described his experience after the power cables running across their house were stolen.
He explained on January 13 he heard a loud noise during the night and realised his invertor had come on. He checked but there was no scheduled load-shedding so he assumed the power must be out due to maintenance. However the next morning he noticed the power cables had been cut.
“We believe they climbed on the wall and then they must have climbed on the roof where they cut the cables, which is why there was such a noise when the cables came down and hit against my wife’s car,” explained Lombard.
What followed was a series of back-and-forth calls between him and City Power (CP) along with numerous logged calls that were simply escalated trying to get the problem resolved. Yet they still spent numerous nights without power and had to throw away everything in their fridge, not to mention the cold showers after the batteries on his invertor ran out.
He stated many CP technicians came out, however, the cables could not be repaired as either they were there to attend to another call and he was not on their list or they did not have enough cable to repair those that had been cut.
He said that the power was finally restored on January 23, and he could go back to taking warm showers and keeping food in their fridge. However, he was left with numerous questions including why the matter took so long to resolve and who is responsible for signing off on work orders to ensure the technicians have the right equipment to complete a job.
He also added this is not the first time cables were stolen in that street and it might not be the last. He noted the street is an easy target as the street lights haven’t been working for the past seven years, except for the one light above the substation.
CP has not commented by the time of publishing, as soon as comment is received an update will be given.
