12 days without power is inexcusable

When Nils Schwarz’s power went off on a Friday afternoon, he had no way of knowing that for almost two weeks he would remain without electricity.

City Power’s service level agreement with the City says that within 90 minutes of an area fault being logged, 30% of power should be restored. In three and a half hours 60% of power must be restored.

No timeframes were provided for individual faults though.

Schwarz works from home, so the extended outage was especially inconvenient despite having some solar support for essential power use to keep his business ticking over, but it is ‘insufficient’.

The Fairland resident said, “As far as I could tell, the problem was a simple faulty breaker on the line feeding power to our property. It is a mess on that pole, but the biggest frustration was trying to log a fault with City Power.”

He says the system for reporting issues does not seem to be able to cross-reference the meter number and account number with the address. “So, if you have more than one address in the system it can assign the fault to the wrong address.

“I kept receiving an error message on the app, and it is extremely frustrating to try and change the address it decided to identify as the problem property via my phone or the website.”

Despite this, he managed to log several calls that were subsequently closed saying the issue had been resolved.

This was in and of itself infuriating says Nils, but the fact no person from City Power calls or checks on a job when an issue has been logged was ‘incomprehensible’.

“This kind of outage can really damage small businesses or put in danger the lives of people who rely on electricity for medical equipment like oxygen concentrators and so on. It is totally unacceptable.”

Spokesperson for City Power Isaac Mangena said, “As in the case of the call logged by the customer on Market Street, there are a couple of factors which contribute to a delay in response which could be attributed to. Inclement weather conditions could delay our response time to outages. Or A customer could be unreachable, either telephonically or not at home, which could result in access issues etc.”

“Our systems are user-friendly; however, it may be difficult for some customers to navigate. Consequently, City Power has a walk-in customer care centre at every Service Delivery Centre (SDC) which enables us to log a call on the customer’s behalf.

“Once the call status changes to ‘allocated’, customers can contact the call centre to follow up on updates about the call logged. Additionally, our communication team provides updates on outages every two hours to keep affected customers informed.

“Customers can contact our new toll-free number 0800 003 156 to escalate individual calls exceeding 24 hours, escalate area outages exceeding four hours and escalate a streetlight outage exceeding seven days.”

As so happens when queries are raised with city entities by journalists, the problem is attended to swiftly. In this case, the following response was received by City Power.

“The fault logged by the customer on Market Road is being attended to. Operators have investigated the cause of the power interruption, and a cable fault has been located. Our teams will continue to keep the customer updated on further developments.”

Schwarz said at the end of the saga, “What this shows is that the problem with City Power does not lie with the repair crews, but rather with the existing fault reporting system and feedback within the system. The team was friendly and efficient and resolved the issue. The effort it took to actually get a team to site in the first place is what needs to be reviewed and improved.”

Related article: Two arrested for City Power infrastructure theft and damage in Northcliff substation.