Load shedding an excuse for non-delivery
BORDEAUX – Councillor believes lack of maintenance at power station is to blame for power cuts and not because of load shedding.
For Ward 101 councillor Ralf Bittkau, load shedding is a scapegoat for City Power not to render services to residents of Johannesburg.
According to Bittkau, on top of Eskom’s load shedding schedule, residents have to continuously endure technical outages that follow up straight after load shedding. “Typically, the power comes on for two to five minutes before it trips and is down for a further four or more hours,” explained Bittkau.
The councillor said the power utility would like residents to believe that the outages are a result of the power grid being overloaded at the point of reconnection but highlighted that this is not the point. Backing up his argument, Bittkau said the Bordeaux feeder substation was a typical example of what leads to the outages in different suburbs. In his observation and visit to the said substation, it looked to be neglected and seemed to have not received maintenance from City Power. “Medium voltage cables are lying in a cable trench which ideally should be filled with sand and covered by metal plates, however, in this case the covering was removed and instead of sand, the trench was filled with water,” elaborated Bittkau.
The councillor said he made the Member of the Mayoral Council (MMC) for Environmental Infrastructure Services Department in the City of Johannesburg Matshidiso Mfikoe aware of the deteriorating state of the feeder substation in December but to date he has not received any response or seen action. “I alerted the MMC and called for an urgent oversight meeting and I further made another attempt in February to get the MMC’s attention on this matter but to date I’m still waiting for a positive response from the MMC,” highlighted Bittkau.
He said he also found burned circuits and switchgears which were just incorporated into adjacent circuits which caused them to run at dangerously high overload levels. “This is the very situation that now causes the continuous inconvenience to residents but neither City Power nor the MMC has shown any interest in remedying the situation,” said Bittkau.
City Power and the Department of Infrastructure and Development in the City of Johannesburg are still to comment.
