Theft and vandalism worsens City Power’s challenges
Mangena pleaded with the residents to be patient and understanding while their teams work around the clock to ensure that their power supply is restored as soon as possible.
According to Isaac Mangena the network challenges across the city are mainly caused by the rise in theft and vandalism that continues to damage their infrastructure. In the past two months, the Randburg Service Delivery Centre has had 20 incidents of theft and vandalism, which includes cables, transformers, and oil.
City Power has apologised to residents of Kensington B, Vandia Gardens, Ferndale and surrounding areas for the prolonged outages in the past weeks.
These areas have had an unstable power supply, which is causing frustration for residents. City Power indicated that the major problems at Kensington B are still being investigated.
Mangena said, “We apologise for the inconvenience caused. We are committed to working around the clock to investigate, run tests, and work on repairs to restore the power supply and investing in long-term solutions to stabilise our network in the area.”
Stand-in 102 ward councillor Julie Suddaby claimed the outage lasted roughly six days and that residents were furious as food gets wasted as fridges and freezers become inoperable.
“Not having a hot shower becomes a serious social barrier. City Power did not communicate with me, only with the residents. All I could do was continue to escalate the outage to City Power daily and hope they did something about it. It seems, when this happens on a Friday night, nothing is addressed until Monday, which is extremely frustrating to the residents.”
“I have lived through a three-day outage, which had me depressed and distressed. I cannot begin to imagine what more than six days without power must emotionally take out of residents,” added Suddaby.
Mangena cited the following recent instances as the reasons for power outages:
Bond 11kv Substation Frere Distributor recently had a case of theft and vandalism, and a body was found inside the mini substation. All legal procedures had to be done, and the site cleared before operators could start running a fault check.
“After running a fault, the power supply could not be restored due to an existing fault on the transformer. After that, the oil level was too low and needed to be filled. Upon restoration, the transformer caught fire; however, the team could not continue with repairs due to access issues.”
A faulty switch at Milner Ave and a faulty cable at Burkes Street were damaged by a fibre contractor.
“The power supply kept tripping when mini substations were loaded on the network the team confirmed that there was a faulty switch and cable.”
Mangena added that another contributing factor is the cold weather, which they have been warning customers about, and resulting in a rise in electricity consumption.
“During this time, higher stages of load-shedding are implemented to reduce the load on the grid. Compromising the City Power infrastructure even further as the network was never designed to be switched on and off regularly, resulting in constant trips post-load-shedding.”
All these challenges have resulted in the Service Delivery Centre deploying more teams on the ground to meet the demand for resources to run faults, test the cables, work on repairs, and restore the power supply.
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