Paying customers soon relieved of illegal connection woes
Soon the uninterrupted practice of illegal electricity connections will be a thing of the past for paying City Power customers in Grobler Park and Lindhaven.
This ideal is held by Ward 85 councillor Carl Mann who has been hard at work to disconnect paying residents from the temporary housing site and Princess informal settlement, the root of the electricity theft problem. The idea, which has been approved and is being implemented, is to eventually reroute paying customers’ substation connections to a substation inaccessible to the regular culprits.
Last Thursday (2 July) Mann invited the Record to the temporary housing site on Van De Linde Road, in front of which the troubling substation stands. Cables seem to be crawling from the substation, slithering between the earth and damaged roadway and hidden under loose bricks to where they’re illegally hooked up to shacks. The live wires and dodgy connections make for an accident waiting to happen, with children kicking a soccer ball in the dust nearby.
Mann proudly showed off the brand new substation installed inside the temporary housing site, to which the 300-odd temporary houses will be connected. Each temporary house will also have a prepaid electricity meter installed, he explained.
The next step is to disband the illegal connections at the roadside substation, to disconnect the paying customers’ connections and to lay the wiring to link them to an outbound substation.
“Two substations to which paying customers can possibly be rerouted have been identified, but we’re waiting for City Power to decide to which,” Mann said.
He alleges the utility has also not yet given a timeframe by which the move will be finalized.
An undisclosed amount of new electric boxes are also stored in the temporary housing site; they are to replace standing electric boxes in the neighbourhood.
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