City Power acknowledged, on June 29, the frustration and inconvenience experienced by customers affected by the prolonged power outage in Parkwood, particularly residents between Cotswold Drive and Englewold Drive.

Saxonwold and Parkwood Residents Association (Sapra) secretary Marcelle Ravid approached the publication on June 21 to highlight the neighbourhood’s concerns. “Many residents remain without electricity because City Power does not have the money to buy a cable. A generator has been placed in Englewold and Cotswold drives for four weeks, since the power utility doesn’t have the cable required for repairs.”

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City Power’s spokesperson Isaac Mangena explained: “This outage has been the subject of extensive investigations and multiple repair attempts by our Hursthill service delivery centre technical team since May 20. While repairs initially restored supply, the cable repeatedly failed and burnt shortly thereafter, indicating a far more complex underground cable fault than originally anticipated.”

Mangena added that following a detailed assessment of the network, the power utility’s technical team concluded that the recurring outages could not be permanently resolved through isolated repairs alone. The existing underground cable has reached a point where multiple faults continue to develop, making it increasingly unreliable and difficult to maintain.

The spokesperson noted that to address the root cause of the problem, City Power took the decision to replace approximately 380m of 11kV underground cable. “However, due to the significant demand for electrical infrastructure across Johannesburg and ongoing network rehabilitation projects throughout the city, the required cable length was not immediately available.”

He added that since customers could not be expected to remain without electricity while procurement and logistical processes were being finalised, City Power implemented a temporary solution by installing a generator to restore supply to affected residents. “This short-term measure was introduced to minimise the impact on households and businesses while preparations for the cable replacement were underway.”

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Ward 117 councillor Tim Truluck disagreed with City Power’s reasoning of the unavailability of the underground cable. “City Power is absolutely bankrupt and cannot do proper repairs at the moment as they have no material, so they’ve put a generator in so at least the residents get power. I suspect they need to find capital expenditure in a region of R2m to R3m or more, if they have to put in a whole lot of cables.”

City Power refuted the claim that they are bankrupt, saying that it is just a mater of timing and supply.

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