Profits leak as companies are left in the dark for two days

Several businesses in Germiston were left without power on Tuesday, Germiston City News reports.

A company representative claimed they reported the outage to the Ekurhuleni metro at 7am and received a reference number.

However, when they followed up with metro, to get an estimated turnaround time, they were told on six separate occasions that the metro’s technicians were on a breakdown, and would attend to the problem as soon as they could.

This was little comfort to the affected businesses that were losing income with each passing hour.

The City News sent a query to the metro to find out what had caused the outage and when the power would be restored.

The metro was also asked to clarify what breakdown the technicians’ were attending to and why it had taken so long to resolve.

Themba Gadebe, spokesperson for the metro, said: “The technicians responded to the power outage on Wednesday.”

Which he claimed was the same day the matter was reported, however, this did not match with claims from Delville Engineering who reported the outage last Tuesday.

Gadebe went on to explain that the breakdown the technicians were dealing with simply meant that there were no technicians available to see to the fault when it was reported.

“Based on a high volume of calls, there was a delay in response to the outages as most outages need teams to collectively work on the problem for a speedy restoration of supply,” he said.

Theft of electrical equipment in the pillar box was to blame for the outage and according to Gadebe power was restored to the area by Wednesday evening.