City Power has warned that the inclement weather conditions is severely affecting its response times in dealing with over two thousand current power outages.
The regional power utility said it has logged a high volume of outage calls, largely resulting from Tuesday night’s heavy rainfall compounded by higher stages of load shedding.
Outages
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the outages in the City of Johannesburg have also been compounded by other problems
“Incidents of cable theft and vandalism in different parts of the City has not made things easier either, leaving a lot of customers without power supply. Close to 2 500 calls were logged by this morning after overnight thunderstorms which triggered equipment failure at various substations.”
Mangena assured resident that City Power teams have been dispatched across the City to try and deal with the reported outage backlogs.
“However, due to the fact that some of the areas are still waterlogged, repairs and restoration process could be delayed.”
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Affected areas
Mangena said the majority of outages have affected Hursthill, where several substations which include Roosevelt, Forrest Town and Parktown north distributor tripped after load shedding during the heavy rains.
There are currently several outages in Roodepoort that our operators are attending to, including Peter Road where installation of a mini-substation was halted by heavy downpours yesterday. Our operators are also responding to Wilropark outage.
“Attempted cable theft at Eikenhof Substation (Lougherin distributor) resulted in power outage that is affecting Naturena Camptonville. Cables were stolen on Monday, but were subsequently repaired and power was restored last night. However, 4-hours after restoration, the cable was damaged again due to attempted theft,” Mangena said.
Repairs
Mangena said other areas affected by the outages including Mulbarton, Glenvista and surrounding areas.
“The repair work at the Nirvana Substation in Lenasia where two faulty cables caused an outage could not be carried out last night due to rainfall. Teams are currently busy.”
“City Power is doubling its efforts and resources in a bid to minimise the impact of the prolonged outages, however, due to a stretched resources, load shedding, bad weather, cable theft and vandalism, our response time will unfortunately be delayed,” Mangena said.
City Power has apologised for the inconvenience caused to customers saying it continues to engage with the local ward councillors to deal with the outages.
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