City Power has announced it is responding to nearly 5 000 outage calls from customers across the City of Johannesburg.
This comes after several areas in Gauteng were lashed by heavy and persistent rain that left a trail of destruction.
Affected areas
Soweto and Lenasia residents were the worst affected by flash floods, which left many substations submerged.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the utility has beefed up resources in different service delivery centres (SDC) to respond to possible outages due to the heavy storms and flooding.
“It’s expected that rains will persist in the coming days which puts our resource under pressure. Our response time may also be affected due to flooded roads and trenches, especially in Roodepoort, Lenasia, Hursthill, among others.”
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Thousands of calls
“City Power opened this morning with about 4 800 outage calls from customers across the City. Most of the calls come from Roodepoort and Hursthill areas where we had many outages over 24 hours,” Mangena said.
Causes of outages
Mangena said there are a few factors that have plunged areas into darkness.
“The outages are as a result of the impact of the recent heavy storms compounded by higher stages of load shedding, where our teams are divided between responding to the maintenance calls, or restore power after every 2 hour load shedding.”
“The impact of load shedding on our infrastructure has also been huge, with the wear-and-tear increasing with every bout of rolling blackouts,” he said.
Teams on standby
Mangena said City Power’s teams are on standby to deal with exacerbated outages.
“While we anticipate more challenges with the rain pounding across our service areas, our teams including contractors who have been working hard to address most of the backlogs are on standby in all the SDCs, ready to respond.”
“With the rain, comes an increase in demand for electricity, so we urge you to ensure you use power sparingly, switch off non-essential appliances to avoid overloading and enable for a smooth restoration, especially after load shedding and any prolonged outages,” Mangena said.
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