Umdoni residents left powerless, and poorer

A NUMBER of Kelso residents, including those living at Abrams Crest, Milkwood Dunes and along the railway line next to the station, have had no electricity since last week.

Surrounding areas, including Pennington and Alkins Drive in Park Rynie were also affected by the outage, which occurred at 11am on Friday.

Power to these areas was however restored later that evening.

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A number of consumers contacted Eskom, only to be told the utility was “trying to locate the fault”.

Neville Kain is diabetic and his medication needs to be refrigerated.

“Seeing that there was no other way of keeping my medication cool, I had to buy a generator on Monday, which set me back R10 000,” he said.

Fisherman and skipper, Wikus van Kraayenburg was also affected.

“I’ve had to throw away more than 200kg of meat and 70kg of fish. I had no choice but to hire a generator which uses R700 worth of fuel a day to try and minimise my losses,” he said.

“I tried to call Eskom more than 50 times and used about 350 cell phone minutes in the process.”

Of particular concern was a woman who is on oxygen, the supply of which requires electricity and who wrote to the Mail saying that when she called Eskom in desperation, she was told to report to a clinic or the hospital.

The woman said that the responses she received from Eskom over the course of the outage ranged from “The technicians are aware of the problem and are on site,” “They are waiting for spares from the contractors and they work until 9pm or 10pm,” on Friday to “The technicians are waiting for the contractors,” “The technicians are waiting for labour,” “The technicians are waiting for the contractors,” and “The technicians will be on site at 8.30am tomorrow” on Saturday and “The technicians have just left for the site at 8.42am,” and “The technicians are waiting for the contractors,” on Sunday.

On Monday however, she received a message saying that the power had been restored, according to field staff.

When she called Eskom to alert them that there was in fact still no power, she was given a new reference number and was told that a new cable needed to be installed.

“I also want to know who will reimburse me for the rotting food in my freezer,” she added.

Eskom was contacted on Tuesday this week and given the reference number supplied to the woman.

The Mail was told that at 11am that morning, workers had arrived on site and that an investigation was carried out.

The fault, it said, had been found, but required “more labour” to fix it.

At the time of writing (Tuesday afternoon) the power had yet to be restored.

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