Cape Town - The City of Joburg has urgently to Eskom to exempt it from load shedding for three days to attend to the escalating faults and outages post torrential rain in the province.
This request was made by Johannesburg Mayor Councillor Mpho Phalatse.
Environment and Infrastructure Services MMC Michael Sun said progress is being made with limited resources in addressing the thousands of outages that have occurred since last week’s inclement weather and flooding.
Sun said faults were 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 load shedding is not only causing 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.
He said the request comes as power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts.
“Accordingly, the Executive Mayor, Councillor Mpho Phalatse, has, on behalf of City Power, submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from load shedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog,” Sun said.
City Power is currently dealing with over 4 000 service calls related to outages, with a significant proportion now being multi-day issues.
It said the areas hardest hit include the larger Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia, where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.
City Power said its operators continue to work tirelessly as all available technical skills have been deployed.
“Whilst we are full out in doing our utmost best to restore the outages and the City’s councillors are doing their best to assist residents, thugs see our technicians as easy targets.
“Yesterday (Sunday), four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted and robbed by six men in Jeppestown whilst in full view of community members standing by.
“Threats and intimidations of technicians are reported daily,” Sun said.
He has appealed to Joburgers to assist in keeping workers safe so everyone may get through the crisis together.
“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,” Sun added.
Stage 5 load shedding is currently being implemented by Eskom across the country.
IOL