CP tackles illegal connections
City Power officials removed more than eight tonnes of wire illegally connected into the power grid in Princess and Witpoortjie.
The ink was barely dry on last week’s Roodepoort Record newspaper when City Power officials, in response to reported illegal electricity connections, convened a convoy of law enforcement officers and technicians to tackle the problem head-on.
A sizeable convoy of vehicles set off from the Roodepoort Police Station toward the first identified sites in Princess informal settlement on Wednesday morning, April 3.
City Power (CP) vehicles filled with technicians and workers, a CP cherry picker truck, police vehicles, and a JMPD escort descended on the Princess informal settlement at about 11am and made their way directly to the pre-identified illegal connection sites.
• Also read: Illegal electricity connections rife in Witpoortjie
A CP power official informed the Record that an inspector from CP was threatened by community members upon his visit to identify the exact locations of the illegal connections the previous day.
Upon arrival at the first site in Australorp Road, CP technicians inspected the two street poles carrying overhead electricity cables that were identified as being compromised, gauging the safest and most efficient ways to rid them of illegal connections, and set about cutting the crudely connected wires.
According to Roodepoort Service Delivery Centre general manager Sibusiso Xulu, the wires illegally connected to the CP grid, are overhead electricity cables, meaning that they must have been stolen elsewhere to be used in these connections.
• Also read: Wrongful disconnection leaves companies in the dark
Once the cables were cut, it was safe for workers to remove all wires leading into the veld and from there, to the many informal houses in the area.
Three cables were run from each pole and run underground to the opposite side where they emerged on the sidewalk. From here, in plain view, crude connections with uninsulated wire lay strewn throughout the veld, leading in different directions toward the nearby informal houses.
“This is very dangerous,” says Xulu. “These uninsulated wires can very easily cause serious injury or death through electrocution. Children are playing here, and people walking.”
CP workers, under the watchful eye of police and JMPD officers, traced these wires into and throughout the informal settlement, ripping them out and removing them as they went. The removed wires soon filled the bed of the truck – and this was only the first stop.
The convoy moved to the next site on the corners of Australorp and Albertina Sisulu roads, where they found illegal connections on a scale that dwarfed the first site, some even leading into private properties and businesses in the area.
After removing over eight tonnes of wire from Princess, the convoy moved to Progress Road in Witpoortjie, where CP removed a similarly large number of illegal disconnections, once again cramming the removed wires into a truck, thereby making it more difficult and costly for illegal connections to be reinstalled.
“We are grateful to community members for pointing out these illegal connections to us. We cannot be everywhere all the time, but with the help of the residents, we are confident that we can stay ahead of this problem,” concludes Xulu.
