The Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, Mpho Phalatse, has urgently requested Eskom grant the City a reprieve from loadshedding of 3 days to meet the nearing insurmountable challenge of escalating faults and outages post torrential rain in Gauteng. 

While progress is being made with limited resources in addressing the 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” MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD), Councillor Michael 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. 

 

Accordingly, the Executive Mayor,Mpho Phalatse has on behalf of 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.” 

 

As of Monday morning, City Power was still dealing with over 4000 service calls related to the outages, with a significant proportion now being multi-day issues. 

 

Areas hardest hit include the larger Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding. 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 the residents, thugs see our technicians as easy targets. Yesterday, four City Power technicians were held at gun point, 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. We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe so we can get thru this crisis together” MMC 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”.