Africa-Press – South-Africa. The City of Johannesburg has pleaded for a three-day load shedding exclusion so that it can overcome escalating faults and outages after torrential rains in Gauteng.
Johannesburg Mayor Mpho Phalatse submitted the urgent request to Eskom as City Power struggled to clear the increasing backlog.
Environment and Infrastructure Services MMC Michael Sun said the City had made progress but that due to continuous rainfall, additional faults were being logged every hour.
“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,” Sun said.
As of Monday morning, there were more than 4 000 service calls related to outages. A significant proportion was for issues that persisted for multiple days.
Areas that were hit the hardest were the larger Roodepoort area, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia, where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.
Sun said operators continued to work around the clock, and that the City deployed all available technical skills.
To add to their woes, Sun said, technicians became soft targets while attending to power outages.
He said:
Four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted and robbed by six men in Jeppestown in full view of community members on Sunday.
“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,” he added.
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