Persisting power outages across Currie Street in Roodepoort have residents fuming and accusing City Power and Ward 84 councillor Johannes Goosen of keeping them in the dark as to the cause of the outages, without any feedback on how long they would last.
According to Gary Merckel who has been living in Currie Street for more than 20 years, they have had to endure power outages almost every week over the past year, at times for 22 hours if not longer.
“The months dating from February 2022 have been the worst. I battled to log into the CP Mobi app while the call centre took forever to answer calls – you can call and wait approximately 35 minutes then just get cut off. Unfortunately you are desperate and have to call again.
“After numerous dropped calls I managed eventually to get the reference. They obviously have our contact details. Cases are being allocated, accepted then closed, and so it goes. Especially during the recent weekend all these messages kept coming through and nothing was done,” said Gary.
Gary told the Record that they have brought the matter to their ward councillor’s attention and that he himself had contacted him via messaging, but ” … he either does not know what he is doing or does not have the guts to take the matter on.
“We need decisive action from all stakeholders involved to rectify this problem because as rate-paying residents we are at the mercy of lazy, incompetent City of Johannesburg (CoJ) employees because they have an attitude that they are doing you a favour, instead of doing their jobs,” said Gary.
Cynthia Silva who has been living in Currie Street for almost 12 years told the Record that they have never had this problem before but since last year it has been on the increase.
According to Cynthia, from the beginning of the year they have had power cuts every weekend. Since February it became worse – first it was every three weeks and then every second week, and currently it happens every weekend.
“Our poles are overloaded with too many houses on one pole. The cables are not even tightened.
“Elderly people and babies live in these houses and need the power to be consistent. We’ve had to throw away so much food because of this, and we really can’t go on like this.
“Our power has not been fully restored after the Easter weekend, and we need the councillor to sort out this issue,” said Cynthia.
On Friday, April 29 at approximately 16:00, the residents started phoning City Power again and according to them, it took forever to get through. When they finally did they were greeted by rude staff who promised that the night shift technicians would restore the power.
The following day, when the power was still not restored one of the resident took it upon himself to go to City Power in Florida to get some answers, and was informed that there is no supervisor so they would not be dispatching any technicians as all technicians are waiting for dispatch orders.
The residents continued to log calls and phone for City Power to come out while another resident got hold of Councillor Goosen. He was asked if he could please arrange for a generator but he said City Power won’t give him one, as he had been denied one in the past.
When contacted by the Record, Councillor Goosen indicated that as the Ward 84 Councillor it had been his wish to provide better updates on power outages across various communities since being elected.
“Although most often than not I’m as much in the dark about these things due to City Power’s inconsistent feedback – whether it be insufficient manpower or lack of resources.
“Despite all this, I don’t hesitate to request escalations on these problems from the relevant entities when residents approach me for intervention, no matter the time of day, as is expected of me,” said Goosen.
