By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The City of Johannesburg has asked Eskom for a three-day exemption from continuing outages to enable City Power to stabilise supply.
Eskom is currently removing 5GW from the national electricity grid, resulting in outages of at least two hours three times a day.
Joburg mayor Mpho Phalatse said the city is dealing with “near insurmountable” challenges relating to escalating faults and outages after the heavy rains hit the province this past week.
“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,” the city said.
“Given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that load shedding is not only causing 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.”
The city stressed that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts.
Accordingly, the mayor submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from load shedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.
As of Monday morning, City Power said it was still dealing with over 4,000 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,” it said.
“While 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,” the city said.
On Sunday, four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted, and robbed by six men in Jeppestown while in full view of community members standing by. Threats and intimidations of technicians are being reported daily, it said.
“We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe so that we can get through this crisis together. 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.”
While Joburg is fighting several battles at once, all major metros in the country are on high alert amid elevated levels of load shedding in the country.