The Record recently reported on the Lindhaven community being left without electricity for a few days since Saturday, August 28.
On Wednesday, September 1, Ward 71 councillor, René Benjamin invited all affected residents as well City Power representatives to the corner of South and Rothchild Roads in efforts to address the issue. City Power officials, however, failed to attend the gathering.
City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena subsequently responded to the matter.
“We have a serious problem of vandalism and cable theft in Roodepoort in general, and Lindhaven and Grobler Park in particular,” Mangena said.
“We have a strong belief that there are people – a gang or syndicate – who go around vandalising the infrastructure and stealing cables. For now we don’t know the motive, except sheer criminality.”
According to Mangena, City Power is currently working on strategies with the local police, JMPD, neighbourhood watch, ratepayers associations, councillors, and Community Policing Forums to ensure they curb the scourge of theft of cables, fuses and doors, and general vandalism of the infrastructure.
“We believe the community is central to this because they are not only inconvenienced by the frequent outages due to this problem, but they live in the communities where the criminals live, and often they see them digging or illegally working on the network,” he said in his response.
The recent two outages in Lindhaven and Grobler Park were due to vandalism and cable theft, he said, adding that they had a team working on repairing the damage the vandals had caused to ensure power was restored.
The outage earlier this week was due to attempted cable theft for which six suspects – mostly foreign nationals – were arrested with the help of the JMPD.
“While we are doing our best to ensure we secure our infrastructure, it’s almost impossible to have a guard at every corner, hence our request for community cooperation,” Mangena concluded.
