City Power, the power utility owned by the City of Johannesburg, has distanced itself from the allegations raised by DA councillor, Nicole van Dyk.
This came after Van Dyk informed residents on social media about the water outages that had happened in a number of City of Johannesburg neighbourhoods.
On Monday morning, Van Dyk said the issue of dry taps is a result of, among other things, City Power following an outage at Eikenhok.
City Power’s spokesperson, Isaac Mangena, said the information was false and misleading.
“She mentioned City Power as a potential culprit for the most recent decrease in pumping pressure in her remarks,” said Mangena.
“Although the organisation recognises the seriousness of the disruption the residents of Johannesburg have experienced, City Power feels that providing false information will only make matters worse.”
He said there was not an outage at Eikenhof over the weekend caused by City Power that impacted the operations of Rand Water and, eventually, Johannesburg Water.
“Eskom is said to be the source of the power supply interruption.”
City Power apologises to residents
Mangena said: “A cable issue on Sunday night caused City Power’s Johannesburg Prison and Vesting Street distributors from the Eikenhof sub-station to trip.
“The activities of Rand Water were unaffected by such disruption in any way.”
He apologised for the inconvenience that was experienced throughout the period of time, where they had a cable issue.
“It is noteworthy that City Power is completing strategies to allow Rand Water to function at peak efficiency even in the event of blackouts or more severe loadshedding. We’ll make those plans public when the time is right.”
After a meeting that councillors had on Monday, Van Dyk said seniors from Rand Water and Joburg Water have been on site investigating the cause of the outage.
“We are seeing a lot of residents saying they have gotten the water back; however, the seniors from both of these entities said there is a further problem,” said Van Dyk.
“Residents, we need to be water-wise for one another because we do not know the levels of the water in the reservoirs, it could easily empty again.”
