Florida residents planning mass action on April 23 after another weekend without electricity

Bottled rage will lash out indiscriminately when needing an immediate outlet.

Feeling as if they had expended all options, residents of Florida affected by widespread weekend outages gathered for a petition signing at the Florida North substation, on April 16. Some areas had been off for three to four days and after perceived inaction from officials, the residents began formalising plans to have their voices heard. After brainstorming further ideas, a date of mass action has now been set for Sunday afternoon, April 23, from 14:00 at the same location.

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The community directed their anger at their ward councillor as well as City Power. The municipal entity had claimed that technicians were on site but a community without electricity assembled at the substation to prove this was not the case. An often repeated complaint, residents stated they would prefer uncomfortably accurate feedback instead of false hope.

Ward 70 Councillor, Caleb Finn, posted daily updates on the electricity outages but residents feel he could do more to apply pressure on City Power in resolving the matter. One member of the petition signing suggested the councillor should post 10 updates a day if necessary, as it was better to repeat old information than to be considered silent.

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It must be stressed that councillors do not have the authority to command any action from any of the City of Johannesburg entities. They act to escalate service delivery issues and advise entity managers, mayoral committee members and the mayor of actions that require attention. In summary, they represent the community they serve, oversee the ward-specific Integrated Development Plan, vote for bylaws and implement policy formulation within the context of the City council.

This issue is not isolated to Florida however, as residents of all corners of Roodepoort battled with some or other electricity outages. On the morning of April 18, outages were being experienced in Davidsonville, Grobler Park, Witpoortjie, Wilro Park and Wilgeheuwel while on April 14, as Stage 6 load-shedding was being implemented, City Power released a statement warning of the severe impact load-shedding has their ability to function effectively.

“Overloading results in costly damages to the infrastructure. We have transformers, mini substations and cables burnt or failed due to post-load-shedding overload. Materials required for repairs are increasingly becoming difficult to source, as is gets depleted faster than we procure. For example, we have so far this year used 27 000 cable joints, an amount we used in the previous three years,” stated City Power Spokesperson, Isaac Mangena.

Using emergency methods to restore service is another factor causing complications, as Mangena explained, “Most of our Medium Voltage infrastructure is operating on an abnormal configuration due to the high number of abnormal plants. The normal situation is to have about 50 or fewer but currently, we have more than 500 plants that are out of service which is attributable to the relentless load-shedding episodes. This is compounded by the fact that during load-shedding we are not able to do maintenance and as such are not able to keep up with the breakdowns which cause outages.”

Councillor Finn was asked for comment via WhatsApp on the morning of April 18 but had not responded at the time of publication. Load-shedding schedules will fluctuate and whether they have electricity or not, residents have vowed to demonstrate at the Florida North substation on April 23. Their cries may be vociferous and aimed at officials nearby, but the message needs to filter to those at the top pulling the electrical strings.