City‘s system took serious knock during load shedding

CITY Power has been experiencing an increase in calls from residents who want to report faults and outages across the City of Johannesburg following the rotational load shedding period which had serious knock on after-effects on our system network.

During load shedding implemented by Eskom this week, City Power suffered serious loses due to among others, cables that were stolen by thieves taking advantage of the system being off. We also had several of our mini sub-stations and pole-mounted transformers popping and exploding due to inrush current during restoration of power after load shedding.

“Our system took a serious knock during load shedding,” said City Power CEO Lerato Setshedi. “Most of our equipment which is old, failed, including switch-gear and cables,” Setshedi added.

The effects of load shedding accelerate the ageing of the infrastructure.

On Friday, February 15 alone City Power has been attending to at least over 400 calls from customers, with 159 of them coming from Hursthill depot area covering Aucklandpark, Rosebank, Northcliff, Cresta; and Reuven depot area which covers Glenvista, Southgate, Kibler Park, Naturena, Mondeor, and Winchester among others.

Efforts to fix and restore the network has been ongoing even though rainy weather is making it difficult in most areas.

“Communities must bear with us as we try and reverse this. We have pulled all our resources to ensure each and every one of these complaints are attended to. We apologise to the residents for the inconvenience this is causing them,” added Setshedi.

City Power anticipates that it will take at least two to three days to clear all the outstanding calls and get the system back on track.

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