City Power strains under storm damage
Severe storms and flooding wreak havoc on several electricity infrastructure in the Northside during the festive season.
Recent storms have brought Johannesburg’s electricity infrastructure to its knees, with City Power (CP) struggling to cope with the aftermath. The utility has received over 3 000 outage queries from affected customers, with areas such as Roodepoort severely impacted.
During December, two mini substations malfunctioned in separate incidents as a result of an explosion caused by bad weather conditions. On December 23, the first fault was at the Krugerrand Road mini substation affecting Strubens Valley, and the second outage was at the Augrabies mini substation affecting Little Falls on Thursday, January 2.
According to CP spokesperson Isaac Mangena, the process of fully restoring the power supply took just over a day due to delays caused by inclement weather. Some of the roads had been flooded, with others blockaded by fallen trees.
“Additionally, these outages occurred at a time when CP was attending to multiple outage queries, sparked by destructive heavy rainfalls and storms.
“The utility is operating under significant pressure, with a backlog of outage reports caused by limited holiday manpower. We are pleased that despite those challenging circumstances, the team managed to resolve the outage and now all affected customers are back on,” Mangena said.
However, Mangena assured customers that efforts are underway to address the backlog.
“We are pleased that despite those challenging circumstances, the team managed to resolve the outage and now all affected customers are back on. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to our customers,” Mangena said.
