Urgent call from COJ to be freed from load-shedding
“It is a simple fact that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts.”
The Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, Councillor Mpho Phalatse, has requested Eskom to grant the City of Johannesburg (COJ) a reprieve from load-shedding for three days to cope with the challenge of escalating faults and outages after the heavy rains in Gauteng.
While progress is being made with limited resources in addressing the thousands of outages that have occurred since last week’s inclement weather and flooding, continuous rainfall means more faults are being logged every hour.
Also read: City Power and Multi-Party Government tighten grip on rotational load-shedding
Also read: Street lights always on amid heavy load-shedding
Through a media statement released on Monday, December 12, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD), Councillor Michael Sun said that, given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that load-shedding is not only causing additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and to stabilise the situation.
“It is a simple fact that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts,” said Sun.
He also confirmed that Phalatse has on behalf of City Power submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from load-shedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.
As of Monday morning, December 12 City Power was still dealing with over 4 000 service calls related to the outages, with a significant proportion now being multi-day issues.
Areas hardest hit include the larger Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.
City Power assured residents that their operators continue to work tirelessly as all available technical skills have been deployed.
“While we are full out in doing our utmost best to restore the outages and the City’s Councillors are doing their best to assist the residents, thugs see our technicians as easy targets.”
Yesterday, four City Power technicians were held at gun point, assaulted, and robbed by six men in Jeppestown while in full view of community members standing by.
Threats and intimidations of technicians are reported daily.
“We are appealing to all residents to help us to keep our workers safe so we can get through this crisis together.
“To vandalise infrastructure such as mini substations to vent the anger of power outages will only delay restoration even longer and put hundreds of other residents in the dark,” said Sun.
Log any outages on www.citypower.mobi and to report cable theft, use any of these 24-hour hotlines: 011 490 7900. 011 490 7911. 011 490 7553.
