Power struggle continues in Joburg as residents still without electricity

Monday marked day seven of no electricity for residents in Fairland, northern Joburg, who said City Power’s “excuse of struggling to cope due to power cuts and persistent heavy rains” was far from the truth, while citing “maintenance crisis and zero accountability” from the power utility.

Residents across Joburg have complained of continued power outages, some allegedly lasted for weeks, while some in areas such as Grobler Park, Lindhaven and Witpoortjie have been without power for five days.

Fairland residents said although the power outages started after several poles fell on Johannes Street, “our power crisis in Fairland started long before the heavy rain and flooding. We have a maintenance crisis in the area,” said the residents.

“We have been without electricity since last week Monday. A number of houses have logged numerous calls to City Power, but they keep getting closed and marked as complete.”

The residents also said they were not only worried about their safety, cold and food getting rotten, they were also worried about the dangers of the “loose cables hanging around”.

ALSO READ: City Power in ‘disaster mode’ as it battles outages caused by devastating Joburg storms

MMC for environment and infrastructure services Michael Sun said while progress was made with limited resources in addressing the thousands of outages that have occurred since last week’s inclement weather and flooding, cable theft was spiralling out of control.

“Given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that load shedding is not only causing to additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and to stabilise the situation” he added.

Joburg mayor Mpho Phalatse has also urgently requested Eskom grant the city a reprieve from load shedding of three days to meet the nearing insurmountable challenge of escalating faults and outages post torrential rain in Gauteng.

ALSO READ: Phalatse requests load shedding reprieve as City Power drowns in outages

However, City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the power utility was still under pressure dealing with unrelated multiple outages across the city in the aftermath of heavy thunderstorms and resultant floods.

“The situation is compounded by the higher stages of load shedding. The outages we are attending to are caused by, among others, cable faults, cable theft, attempted theft and vandalism,” Mangena said.

“We opened up with almost 4 000 outage calls this morning, with Roodepoort service delivery centre sitting with close to 2 079, followed by Hursthill at about 1 200, and Randburg with 303 open outage calls.”

He said in Roodepoort, 80% power had been restored. “Test branch is currently locating the fault. Repairs on the remaining 20% will be executed once the fault has been located.”