Backlog of outages puts City Power under pressure
City Power has since beefed-up teams in problematic areas to ensure that they deal with the backlogs.
On Tuesday, November 15 City Power confirmed that they are under tremendous pressure due to the backlog of outages across the City of Joburg.
In the morning the power utility opened up with just over 3 000 outage calls reported by our customers, with half of those over 24 hours.
According to City Power, the outages in most areas are due to, among others, multiple faults, equipment failures, vandalism and theft.
City Power Spokesperson Isaac Mangena said that the backlogs are exacerbated by load-shedding and rainy weather over the weekend, which they have not yet recovered from.
City Power has since beefed-up support teams in problematic areas to ensure that they deal with the backlogs.
“What we are doing is to recall all our resources off shift which should alleviate some of the challenges,” said Mangena.
Mangena said that they are also in a process of recruiting about 150 technicians with 70 of them ready to start on December 1, with the rest starting early next year.
“We are continuing to ramp up maintenance of our infrastructure to avoid failures, even though load-shedding is not assisting. We also firming up our partnership with the service providers who are assisting by using their material in certain instances to ensure the repairs are done expeditiously. The impact of load-shedding to our resources and infrastructure cannot be ignored,” added Mangena.
City Power has lost in excess of over R300 million a day since July to repair and replace failed equipment during the 99 days of load-shedding.
“We are working alongside councillors in different regions to ensure customers are informed of the challenges and are able to plan their lives, we apologise for the inconvenience caused by this,” said Mangena.
