By Nick Wilson.
Eskom confirmed on Friday that theft caused of five pylons to collapse on Monday night – this time along the R101 in Hammanskraal.
On Sunday, seven pylons on the N4 in Pretoria collapsed, leaving large parts of the eastern suburbs without power for a few days.
Mashangu Xivambu, maintenance and operations senior manager in Gauteng for Eskom, said theft and vandalism of pylons are spreading across the Gauteng.
“It is disturbing that this incident happened shortly after a similar incident affecting the City of Tswhane customers where pylons also fell due to theft and vandalism.”
Xivambu said theft and vandalism had risen to disastrous proportions and were threatening essential services and people’s lives across Gauteng.
The latest incident has also prompted a top business body to say the state should thoroughly investigate the matters to satisfy itself that nothing more sinister like sabotage was at play.
Contacted for comment, Cas Coovadia, CEO of Business Unity South Africa, said the state should launch a thorough investigation given the allegations of corruption and sabotage at the utility that former CEO Eskom CEO André de Ruyter had previously publicly flagged.
“One has to ask questions about it, particularly given two incidents on top of each other. If it is sabotage for instance, we need a crack team that goes in and identifies what is happening, who the culprits are and sets up sting operations and do what needs to be done to get to the bottom of it.”
Energy analyst and MD at EE Business Intelligence, Chris Yelland, said these types of incidents were not new, adding people were stealing the cross-members of the pylons “for steel and selling it no doubt for scrap”.
He said the theft of infrastructure from the pylons had “massive consequences, not just in terms of the cost of repairing pylons”, but also its broader effect on businesses and people’s lives in general.
“The cost of lost production, the cost of loss of supply to businesses, obviously consumers also experience great inconvenience, and there may be costs of losses of food as a result of lack of refrigeration and it has enormous economic consequences. It also has consequences in respect of crime, because in the darkness crimes occur. Opportunistically, people engage in crime when it is dark. And again this results in a loss of life.”
Yelland said it was critical that police and the courts treated these incidents as “most serious crimes against society”, adding they were not “treated with the level of seriousness that they should be treated”.
“They need to report and arrest criminals. If you turn a blind eye to this, it’s just like a cancer that grows.”
Eskom said in a statement on Friday that plans were underway to rebuild the infrastructure at Hammanskraal “as the integrity of the towers was compromised beyond repair”.
“The theft of tower members leads to the instability and collapse of the pylons that carry high voltage power lines, which then poses a serious safety risk to members of the public and often results in the interruption of supply. Such criminal practices have an additionally devastating impact on the economy and on Eskom’s ability to sustain the provision of electricity,” said the utility, which added it spent a “fortune” replacing damaged pylons and other network equipment.