City Power slashes power outage calls

City Power said it has managed to attend to almost 3 000 outage calls out of the backlog of 5 000 calls it received after the recent devastating storms which plunged several areas into darkness.

This comes after Eskom granting the City of Johannesburg a 72-hour reprieve from load shedding in order to attend to the huge maintenance and repair backlogs.

Outages

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said teams are still attending the to the balance of the outages.

“We can safely say that we are on the right track in terms of recovery and dealing with the huge backlogs we encountered due to the recent floods and thunderstorms.”

Damages cost

Joburg Mayor Mpho Phalatse’s spokesperson Mabine Seabe said there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

“We estimate the cost to normalise the electricity supply following the devastating floods to be in the region of R31-million, with overall damage to infrastructure, across Departments and Entities, to be in the region of R300-million,” he said.

He thanked Joburg residents for their patience.

“We appreciate and commend the help and cooperation we received from councillors and community leaders, some spending sleepless nights attending to residents’ queries.

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State of disaster

“Further to this, I would like to thank the MMC for Environment and infrastructure Services. Michael Sun, the CEO of City Power, Ms Tshifularo Mashava, and their teams for the progress they have made under very difficult conditions,” Mangena added.

Seabe said a detailed report has been submitted to the National and Provincial Disaster Management Centres in order to classify the ongoing emergency as a State of Local Disaster.

Arrests

Meanwhile, City Power has welcomed the arrest of seven people suspected of cable theft in different areas across the City over the weekend.

Mangena said four of the suspects were arrested by the SAPS Essential Infrastructure Task Team around Nasrec area after they were found digging cables.

“Two suspects were pulled out from a tunnel along Christiaan De Wet Road and Clarendon Drive by the local security and community also with cables that were cut and stolen. This was the reason for some outages in the area.

“Another suspect was arrested in Kya Sands for vandalising our transformer after he was found by the SAPS connecting the nearby informal settlement illegally,” he said.

Mangena said the suspects have been charged with damage and theft of essential infrastructure.

Cable theft

“During the same period City Power recorded about 22 incidents of cable theft and vandalism in different areas since Thursday. We commend the work done by the SAPS, CPFs and private security in assisting us curb the scourge of theft and vandalism.”

“Most of the incidents happened during load shedding where risks of injuries or even death are not there,” he said.

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