City Power warns of marauding syndicates of cable thieves
City Powers warns of marauding syndicates, especially in Alexandra and Lenasia, that pose as the entity's employees or contractors to gain access to households to steal cables under the guise that they were there to replace them.
City Power has urged residents in Alexandra and Lenasia to be on the lookout for people posing as the entity’s technicians and working on infrastructure.
This follows what the entity described as a widespread network of syndicates operating in the two areas who disguise themselves as City Power employees and stealing cables from households.
“We have been getting increased complaints regarding incidents of theft of service cables. There seems to be a syndicate stealing these cables from households, particularly in the Lenasia and Alexandra Service Delivery Centres who disguise themselves as City Power employees.
“We would like to alert residents that City Power has not embarked on any project to replace these cables and we urge councillors and residents to be vigilant at all times in their areas. Question anyone claiming to be a City Power technician or contractor working in their area by requesting them to produce IDs and job cards that explain why they are working in those areas,” City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.
Mangena said the entity was also experiencing high-call volumes with 1 549 outage calls recorded at the start of the day.
“Teams from all the SDCs [Service Delivery Centers], have been dispatched to investigate these outages, while other teams are on the ground attending to outage calls. We will be beefing up teams into areas throughout the day to ensure the repairs are speedily done and power is restored,” he said.
Mangena said they were unable to deal with the high backlog of outage calls in the past 24 hours, as the entity was running out of stock material, such as MV cables, LV cables, mini substations (MSS), bulk metering kiosks, breakers and joints.
“Our SDCs are battling to deal with these high demands of repairs due to cable theft and vandalism, as well as multiple cable faults. Loadsheding is further having a negative impact on our infrastructure, which by its nature was never meant to be switched on and off at short regular intervals,” Mangena added.
For that reason, he said, many of their mini substations, pole-mounted transformers, and transformers often catch fire or fail post-load-shedding due to different reasons including overloading and inrush current, resulting in City Power having to replace more stock material faster than it can be replenished.
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