PERSISTENT power outages across the Berea have residents fuming and accusing the city of keeping them in the dark as to the cause of the outages and no feedback on how long they will last.
Ward 27 councillor Ernest Smith said residents in some parts of Morningside, Overport, Musgrave and Glenwood had been without electricity for more than 24 hours. He said he and other councillors had been inundated with calls and messages querying what was going on, as the municipality had provided no feedback.
On Thursday, 16 January, the municipality posted on its Facebook page a statement announcing that over the past few weeks eThekwini Electricity had been inundated with network faults due to extremely hot and humid weather.
“In some instances, there were repeated faults on the same network, like the cable fault between Glenwood Major and Hunt Road which failed again, even after repairs,” reads the post.
It said currently there are 20 mini substations in Musgrave covering Botanic, Ritson, Mansfield and all the way to Currie Road. “We further have an additional 23 mini substations off in Glenwood extending from Bulwer towards Lancers Road. We ask that you bear with us during this difficult time as our technicians are currently on-site working to restore supply as soon as possible.”
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Responding to the outages, Smith said he was aware of two faults in Glenwood last night (Wednesday, 15 January) and one in Musgrave, which also affected Morningside, and a transformer fault in Maydon Wharf.
“The infrastructure is faulting at different points across the city, at weak points and substations. The problem is the system is more than 50 years old. We are sitting with some of the oldest infrastructure in the country. The system is not designed to be turned on and off all the time. I believe the municipality is not able to keep up with the faults. I question whether the procurement process is working fast enough to provide technicians on the ground with parts when needed. Technicians are doing the best they can with what they have,” he said.
Smith said he understood residents’ frustrations, but appealed to them to be patient and mindful of the fact that the infrastructure is old and not being maintained.
“These are not planned outages and the Electricity Department is doing the best it can. Ward councillors are trying their best to assist in reporting faults as well, trying to usher service delivery on, however we can only rely on the heads of departments and officials to assist in pushing service delivery forward,” he said.
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