Living in the dark has become the new normal for many of us in South Africa, with constant rolling blackouts. However, residents of Wilgespruit often sit without power for hours on end.
Justin Bradfield said one weekend the area had no power for 25 hours! “Every time there is a thunderstorm or it rains we lose power. Last week we had no power for 15 hours, and on November 15, we didn’t have electricity for more than nine hours.”
Communications officer for City Power, Isaac Mangena we had no prolonged outage affected in the said area in a very long while. Where there have been extended outages like planned maintenance, cable theft etc, we have communicated to the customers, including the one complaining.” He said even with the impact of load shedding they have had very little to no outages in the area “often when there is a big outage going on for a longer period like the customer alleges, it will show with the increase in the number of logged calls from the area and that has not been seen.” He said “when we trace the reference numbers provided from this customer, they show that the calls were logged on November 10 and closed on November 11 with everything fixed. We had a medium voltage outage affecting the area which was restored.”‘
At around 15:30 on November 18,”Bradfield said they had been without electricity since 5:00 that morning. “This cannot be a perpetual situation with no solution,” he added.
