Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse has appealed to Eskom to grant the city a three-day reprieve from loadshedding, citing escalating faults and power outages as a result of bad weather and week-long flooding.
The city’s MMC for environmental and infrastructure services, Michael Sun, said in a statement on Monday that City Power is unable to effectively attend to outages on time.
“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 resulting 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,” said Sun.
“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.
“Accordingly, the executive mayor, councillor Mpho Phalatse, has on behalf of the City Power submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from loadshedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.”
The areas in and around the city that have been heavily affected by power outages include the Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia.
“Whilst we are full out in doing our utmost best to restore the outages and the city’s councilors are doing their best to assist the residents, thugs see our technicians as easy targets,” Sun said.
“Yesterday, four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted and robbed by six men in Jeppestown in full view of community members. Threats and intimidation of technicians are reported daily.”
Sun has urged members of the community to work with the city and ensure that City Power technicians do their work without being intimidated or attacked. “We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe, so that we can get through this crisis together.
“To vandalise infrastructure such as mini sub-stations to vent the anger [as a result] of power outages will only delay restoration even longer and put hundreds of other residents in the dark.”
The current loadshedding status by Eskom remains at stage five countrywide, and City Power is currently dealing with over 4 000 service calls related to the outages.
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