JOBURG mayor Mpho Phalatse has asked power utility Eskom to grant the city a three-day reprieve from loadshedding in order to deal with escalating faults and outages following devastating flash floods in many parts of Gauteng.
As of Monday, City Power was still dealing with over 4 000 service calls related to the outages. The areas hardest hit include Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia, where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.
MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD), Michael Sun, said progress is being made with limited resources in addressing thousands of outages that have occurred since last week’s inclement weather and flooding.
Continuous rainfall means more faults are being logged every hour.
“Given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that loadshedding is not only causing to additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and to stabilise the situation,” Sun said.
“It is a simple fact that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts.”
Sun said operators continue to work tirelessly as all available technical skills have been deployed.
While the team is out doing utmost best to restore the outages and the city’s Councillors are doing their best to assist the residents, the city warned that “thugs see our technicians as easy targets.”
On Sunday, four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted, and robbed by six men in Jeppestown while in full view of community members standing by.
Threats and intimidations of technicians are reported daily.
“We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe so we can get through this crisis together,” Sun said.
“To vandalise infrastructure such as mini-sub stations to vent the anger of power outages will only delay restoration even longer and put hundreds of other residents in the dark”.
The SA Weather Service has issued a level 5 warning for severe thunderstorms in certain areas in Gauteng.
This could mean more rain and possible floods.
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