City Power has apologised to residents of Ferndale, Bryanston, Kensington B and surrounding areas following extensive electricity outages in recent weeks. To say these residents are frustrated with their situation would be a severe understatement.
Regular tripping following load-shedding, a seemingly shoddy installation of a new mini-substation, extensive delays in response times, and an apparent lack-lustre attitude from City Power staff form the crux of complaints.
“Every week there is a major outage, just in a different street,” lamented Ferndale Residents Association co-chairperson Erica de Jager. “With the one outage, there were five days without power in the street and I went to City Power’s offices seven times to sort it out. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Also read: Residents of West Avenue in Ferndale go to City Power offices to resolve problems
She said one outage lasted a whole 114 hours – almost five days.
Michiel Bouwer of Bouwer and Olivier Inc Attorneys finds it incredibly frustrating. “We’ve had to run the generator non-stop just to continue with basic operations,” he said.
“It’s hard enough to cope with load-shedding, but when you don’t have any power in-between to charge backup batteries, it makes it nearly impossible to run a business.”
He said other companies in the complex have been even worse affected. One, in particular, had to spend half its revenue generated in the past two weeks just to purchase fuel for its generator.
Ward 104 Emi Koekemoer said there were numerous power outages that lasted between four and six days, for three weeks.
“Those included the Harley Street substation seeing two transformers go down, another min-sub had to be replaced and another one had a vandalised box. Once, the whole block was out for a day,” she said.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the entity’s resources have been highly stretched with the high number of calls due to cable faults, theft, and vandalism across the Randburg area. “There was an incident of a cable fault at Harley Street substation that tripped on both Eskom’s and City Power’s sides; both resources were dispatched on-site to investigate, repair cables, and restore the power supply,” he said.
“The area has also been attacked by thieves who exploded a [ring main unit] RMU and pillar boxes. In some instances, most of these incidents affected the same customers, leaving them without power for an extended period. City Power, therefore, urges customers to use electricity wisely. Please keep appliances such as geysers, heaters, stoves, and Solar/UPS battery chargers unplugged to reduce the burden on the grid upon restoration.”
The cables and RMU were replaced and a pillar box was temporarily fixed, awaiting cables to replace the damaged lines permanently. All residents now have power supply, Mangena concluded.
