City Power has applauded the patience and cooperation of the residents of Parkhurst and the surrounding areas who were affected by the prolonged outages since Christmas day.
The area has been without electricity for the past four days due to multiple cable faults.
Amid the darkness, some dedicated men and women shone brightly and took the wheel to ensure that work was completed and power was restored to customers.
The hero of the operation according to City Power was Joe Kumirai, who remained on site for the past four days, lifting pick and shovel, cracking and grinding concrete and tar into the earth, and pulling cables.
He and his team located the fault on the first Christmas day after 12 hours of searching and four meters—that’s how deep the faulty cable was under the belly of the earth.
City Power CEO, Tshifularo Mashava says that according to their records, the cable was laid 85 years ago, in 1937, and their team had to go through at least two slabs of thick concrete and tar before allowing them to access the cable.
“Our colleagues from Joburg Road Agency (JRA) also came in to assist with the digging with specialised equipment and appreciate and we recognise how this impacted our customers during the holiday season,” Mashava added.
She concluded by apologising to the impacted communities for the outages.
Hursthill SDC general manager Malope Ramagaga said, “The team embodied resilience as part of the values of City Power. We are esteemed to have teams that put the customer first – three days none stop on the fault is unheard of especially in these days of holidays and times.”
While the power has been restored, they recognise that during the downtime, certain things, such as vandalism and cable theft, could have happened.
“Individual households or blocks may also remain off for specific faults that we will need to attend to, we urge you to please log calls so we can send technicians through,” Ramagaga concluded.
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