Savoy, Elton, and Highlands North residents are frustrated with City Power’s lack of response to power issues in the areas.
Ward 74 councillor Belinda Kayser-Echeozonjoku noted that the weekend of March 3-4 was an absolute nightmare due to not having electricity for over 72 hours.
“All these references had been escalated with no clear update from City Power for 48 hours. It took City Power 48 hours when the technicians finally arrived it was vandalism and technicians onsite who told residents it could take days.”
Kayser-Echeozonjoku added that it took the power utility 48 hours, to tell residents that repairs would take days to complete, and as the councillor, she tried to deal with City Power’s lack of communication.
City Power’s spokesperson, Isaac Mangena explained that the outage in Savoy was due to vandalism and when the team was notified of an outage call, operators were dispatched to investigate and found the Transformer Switching Station severely damaged.
“Given the extent of the damage, we needed to replace essential components such as the switch and that requires time due to the lengthy process involved in sourcing those materials. The team then applied temporary measures to cut the normal turnaround time and to ensure that customers did not have to spend more time without a power supply.”
Mangena added that customers in Flaming Road were restored while the process of repairing the vandalised station was ongoing.
The power utility also had another outage over the past weekend. Fort distributor from Cydna substation tripped in the early hours of Sunday affecting the Elton Hill area.
“The cause of that outage was a cable fault. The team managed to restore 95% of the power supply in that area on March 3. However, we struggled to restore the remaining part because the test branch struggled to locate the faulty part of the cable,” said Mangena.
He added that the team returned to the site on March 4 to continue with their work and found the fault later that afternoon. Repairs were then carried out and completed on March 5 and the power supply was fully restored.
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