Helderkruin Residents and Tax payers writes:
On Sunday, 22 February the power supply feeding a portion of the residential area in Helderkruin ext. 29 was interrupted due to a cable fault which occurred next to a mini substation located in Comet Street.
Although the incident happened at 10am in the morning, electrical personnel from Joburg City only arrived very much later at about 7pm – nine hours later.
It was pointed out 8pm by Helderkruin residents to the Joburg electrical inspection crew, that a heavy bang was heard at the mini-substation in Comet street.
As a faulty cable joint was suspected, the faulty cable was isolated in the mini substation and power was restored to other areas of Helderkruin.
It was then mentioned by the inspection crew that contractors would be called out to rectify the problem, still affecting the portion of Helderkruin towards Dakota street.
The contractor repair crew was, however, only sent the next day and only arrived at 11am on Monday, another 13 hours later. Surely there must be a sufficient number of contractors available for emergencies, or is power outages not seen as emergencies.
We as residents affected feel very annoyed as a total of 22 hours passed where nothing happened, while our deep freezes were defrosting and even small fish were dying without oxygen as mentioned by one resident.
Another resident was threatened by attackers in the dark and just escaped by running away.
Not mentioning other discomforts like sick people, we feel that such poor support and response for expensive services which residents pays millions of rands for, is totally unacceptable.
During this whole saga nobody can discuss and question issues from trained technical supervisors, which hides like government establishments behind automated switchboards, answering machines and operators not capable of discussing technical issues occurring during such incidents. The managers of all other large private industries, such as mining industries can be contacted at all hours of the day and night by anybody. Why are these people always protected and we pay for their services with our money.
This is also not the first incident of this nature.
We pay large sums of money for these services and appeal to municipal authorities to deliver when expected from them, and someone must take responsibility.
