Pieter Ellis writes:
It is Sunday 19 June 2016 and yet again we have a power outage in the Wilgeheuwel, Radiokop, Strubensvalley, and Honeydew area. You did an article a couple of weeks ago regarding this, and since then it seems that City Power wanted to prove that they can fit even more power outages into their schedule.
Last week alone, we had three power outages, today’s (19 June) is the third since this morning 08.55am and up till now, 12.55pm, it has not been restored yet. In your article you had comments from Jaco Engelbrecht and City Power.
City Power obviously tried their best to obfuscate the fact that they are unable to contain the dirge of cable theft. Today’s outage is also due to cable theft. The fact that these outages were due to cable theft during the day, shows that City Power doesn’t know how to contain the problem. Some people are suggesting that their employees might even be complicit in cable theft.
Just in this month of June, we have had four outages, each lasting more than 12 hours and stretching to 18 hours. This happened on 1 June, 14 June, 15 June and 19 June. During May, we had outages on 14 and 19 May. All these outages were due to ‘cable theft’. Obviously, City Power will try their best to hide this fact.
This cable theft situation must be contained, but it seems City Power is incapable of doing so. Surely basic maths will prove it to be less costly to appoint good security guards than to replace the cables continually.
Why do the outages always affect the exact same areas? It is always a section of Strubensvalley, Wilgeheuwel Ext. 3, a section of Honeydew, and a section of Radiokop.
Can you do a follow-up as our councillor is not providing answers? As the councillor, I would expect him to escalate this through the right channels and get results. We as ratepayers are utterly and truly gatvol.
