City of Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse has asked Eskom to exempt the city from load shedding for three days.
In an urgent plea on Monday morning, Phalatse said the request was to allow City Power to “meet the nearing insurmountable challenge of escalating faults and outages”, owed to torrential downpours throughout Gauteng over the past week.
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More rain on the way
“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,” Phalatse said.
Load shedding is currently on stage 5 until further notice due to “unusually high demand”, and the breakdown of a generating unit each at Hendrina, Kendal and Kriel power stations.
ALSO READ: Govt apologises for ‘devastating’ load shedding
The South African Weather Service on Monday issued an orange level 5 warning for severe thunderstorms in Gauteng.
Storms with possible strong, damaging winds, large amounts of small hail and heavy downpours are forecast, with flooding possible in low-lying areas and informal settlements.
MMC for environment and infrastructure Michael Sun said on Saturday City Power was dealing with at least 1 000 active outages.
As of Monday morning, City Power had received over 4 000 service calls related to outages.
Areas most adversely affected by downpours include Roodepoort, Hurst Hill, Northcliff and Lenasia, with significant infrastructure severely damaged.
ALSO READ: City Power attending to thousands of outages, but concerned about attacks
Technicians in danger
While City Power drowns in outages, Phalatse said technicians were seen as “easy targets”.
She said four technicians were held at gunpoint, robbed and assaulted on Sunday while attending to outages by six men in Jeppestown “whilst in full view of community members”.
Technicians were also attacked in Hillbrow and Alexandra last month, which left one hospitalised.
“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,” he warned.
ALSO READ: City Power in ‘disaster mode’ as it battles outages caused by devastating Joburg storms
