WITH heavy rain, severe weather and hectic lightning storms raging across the Zululand region of late, power outages in Richards Bay have become a fairly regular occurrence.

Whether heavy weather, cable theft or car accidents, robot intersections on the city’s road network are left without electricity more often than is ideal; a situation costing the City of uMhlathuze millions.

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But the most recent outage at one particular robot intersection in Richards Bay could be put down to none of these scenarios.

In what is a more-often-than-realised situation, a gecko that was electrocuted inside a fuse box was the culprit this time around, causing chaos at the intersection in question earlier this week amid the morning rush hour.

In an effort to keep constituents informed, uMhlathuze Deputy Mayor Christo Botha took to social media on Monday afternoon to explain the reason behind this latest outage – a somewhat more humorous incident than normal.

“This is unfortunately a regular event that happens quite often! A couple of months ago, we had a similar situation going to Birdswood at the intersection with Essenwood Road,” said Botha.

“Not sure if the geckos are looking for warmth, but they get in there and then blow the whole thing up!”

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