Several houses in Ferndale spent most of eight days without power recently.
Residents in West Avenue complained to Randburg Sun of food that had gone bad and had to be thrown away, not having clear or sincere responses from City Power, and having lights on but no hot water or appliances working for days.
This after a cable had to be replaced but the new one was found to have its own issues, and it also needed to be replaced.
“People work from home and they really struggled,” said Ferndale Residents Association co-chairperson, Erica de Jager.
“Often when we log calls with City Power they say a team is on-site but they really aren’t. It is a stalling tactic. We ended up going to the City Power offices on Hans Schoeman Drive, as that is the only way they ever help us.”
Liz van Rensburg said she sat and waited in the entity’s office until someone would help her, though this was difficult in itself because staff seemingly gave her the run-around, telling her a team was dispatched to assist when she later found out they had not even left the offices yet.
“If you don’t log a call you will wait six months for them to fix something, or they just won’t help at all,” she complained.
“So we have taken to logging calls and taking those reference numbers to the offices in person, and waiting until they finally help.”
Ian Mackenzie questioned the expertise of contractors, who installed the faulty cable, which led to the tripping, low-phase power supply and eventual outage for a few more days.
Veronica Prigg, on the other hand, drew attention to the problems City Power itself faces in the growing number of faults due to load-shedding, as well as vandalism, illegal connections and other issues, while their budget is too small to cover the work needing to be done.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the outages in West Avenue were caused by multiple cable faults.
“We then requested our test branch team to assist, and power was then temporarily restored. We can confirm that power is now fully restored,” he said.
Ward 104 councillor Emi Koekemoer said this outage occurred around the same time as two outages on Republic Road and another on Elise Road in her ward.
These each lasted at least six days, and also included multiple cable faults.
“With the rains, all these temporary connections are busy failing and City Power never goes back to do the permanent fix, I don’t know if it is because they don’t have enough resources or they don’t have enough technicians but residents are suffering severely,” she lamented.
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