Honeydew resident waits 8 days for power to be restored

After what appeared to be yet another cable theft situation during routine load-shedding in the Honeydew area, one property owner was left in the dark after her neighbours’ power was restored but not hers.

Anya van Loggerenberg explained how she emailed City Power about the issue.

“It started to feel like a game of ping pong – I send an email they reply, I send another and the process never ceases – until Thursday [November 9] around three in the afternoon when I got the Roodepoort Northsider out.

That’s when a City Power contractor finally appeared and started fixing the broken and stolen power lines,” she exclaimed.

Van Loggerenberg added that the eight days without power was not only a struggle for her and her many animals, including horses but almost unbearable for her tenant who was nurturing her four-month-old baby.

“I am fortunate to be able to breastfeed my little girl, but even so I have stored milk that went bad because of the lack of power. How can I ensure my daughter’s bottles and toys are sanitised without electricity to help warm the water and steam the bottles?” Zikithi Biggs questioned.

They both agreed that the fact that they were the only house affected by this outage was also frustrating as they thought that the people responsible for restoring their power didn’t think it was important enough to do promptly.

“They are making such a big fuss about disconnecting those who have not paid their electricity bills, but we pay our bills and have to sit for a week if not longer, to just get our power restored,” she concluded.

The Roodepoort Northsider has reached out to City Power in regards to the delayed reaction, and they responded to our questions stating, “The team leader explained that with the high volume of cable theft, vandalism, and ageing infrastructure, we are not meeting the demands supply on time. We apologise for this inconvenience and will continue to address outages within the stipulated time frames.”