Noordgesig and Pennyville residents protest against power outages
"We have been asking City Power to separate us from Pennyville so we run as two separate areas, yet that has not happened.”
Residents of Noordgesig and Pennyville embarked on a protest action to try and force City Power to restore their power following unplanned blackouts.
The protest went on for a few days this week with residents disrupting traffic on New Canada Road, N17, Soweto Highway and Main Road in Noordgesig.
This follows days of not having electricity and residents said since Saturday, they had been having constant power outages.
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Ismael Steenkamp, a community leader said, “According to City Power there is an overload that is happening, however we are getting power that is being split between us and Pennyville.
This has been an ongoing issue since protesting is something we normally don’t do as a community.
“We have been asking City Power to separate us from Pennyville so we run as two separate areas, yet that has not happened.”
As part of their efforts to get their power restored, residents went on to march to the City Power offices in Johannesburg on the morning of April 18. The march was led by Ward 29 councillor, Brenda Dammie.
“We went today and fetched them because every day they’ll promise that they are coming but finally the community said ‘councillor you can’t wait for them so go to the office and fetch them’.
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“Right now they are busy with the problem in Phase Four and they’ve promised that the electricity will be back,” said the councillor.
Responding to the residents, City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena said, “Our teams have been hard at work after we picked up this outage around 7:00 pm last night and we’ve been working tirelessly to conduct repairs so that supply is restored to the customers in Pennyville and Noordgesig areas.”
Mangena reiterated the cause of the outages as communicated to the residents before saying it was as a result of overhead lines that snapped due to overloading on the network.
“Whilst the teams are hard at work with repairs to restore, we appeal to customers to avoid overloading the network through illegal connections which are rife in these areas,” added Mangena.
