I have just finished reading this week’s Northsider (thanks for your efforts!)
There have been two major incidents recently that probably deserve some discussion – admittedly one was too late for the current edition.
A) Joburg Water – There was a decision to execute maintenance at a local facility which meant a large area being without water for between 22 and 48 hours.
It was just by chance that my wife discovered the message from JW that several suburbs would be without water, including Weltevreden Park. I then became a “twit” and tried to follow the conversation on Twitter (via the internet). JW claimed that they had submitted an article to Roodepoort Record.
I called a few neighbours and several were completely unaware of the cuts which, in fact, did last 46 hours!
In the event, my area of Weltevreden Park was not affected (although others were).
A couple of issues:
• When JW informed residents of the areas affected, they were not very precise about Weltevreden Park, which is a large suburb
• When JW advertise maintenance, they should emphasise the likely outage time and not the time for actual maintenance
• The JW website is actually very poor. There is a section called “Planned Outages”. I would have thought that this particular maintenance would have qualified as “planned”, but the website still shows that the most recent planned outage was 26 September (and that was a completely different area)
• JW seem to be very proud that they make full use of social media for communication – but that is a media for the young. I doubt that most householders are into social media!
B) City Power – After the destructive hail-storm on Monday, there was clearly a lot of restoration work to be done.
I don’t know which suburbs were affected, but power in Weltevreden Park was out from 7.30am until 3pm.
After 1 ½ hours of relief, the power went out again at 4.30pm and only came on again at 1.30am. So, the total downtime was 16½ hours.
Hopefully, the reason was that CP decided to solve the ongoing downtime that some areas of Weltevreden Park have experienced in the past. Or it may be that CP was just extremely stretched by the sudden workload. Either way, I think it would help with community relations if CP was completely open about the long downtimes (and why there were two).
