Africa-Press – South-Africa. Johannesburg power entity City Power opened on Tuesday morning to around 4 800 outage calls from customers across the city.
Most of the calls come from Roodepoort and Hursthill, where outages have persisted for more than 24 hours.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the entity beefed up resources at different service delivery centres to respond to possible outages due to the heavy storms and flooding.
He said City Power expected the rain to persist in the coming days, “which puts our resources under pressure”.
“Our response time may also be affected due to flooded roads and trenches, especially in Roodepoort, Lenasia and Hursthill, among others.”
He added that the outages were caused by the recent heavy storms and compounded by higher stages of load shedding. He said City Power’s “teams are divided between responding to the maintenance calls or restoring power after every two-hour load shedding [slot]”.
He said the impact of load shedding on the City’s infrastructure was “huge” and that wear and tear increased with every round of rolling blackouts.
On Monday, Johannesburg Mayor Mpho Phalatse appealed to Eskom for a 72-hour reprieve from load shedding so the City could perform repairs and maintenance on infrastructure damaged by the storms.
Environment and Infrastructure Services MMC Michael Sun said the blackouts were preventing work from being completed and left a mounting backlog of repairs.
“While we anticipate more challenges with the rain pounding across our service areas, our teams – including contractors working hard to address most of the backlogs – are on standby in all the service delivery centres, ready to respond,” he said.
City Power appealed for patience and cooperation from customers during this time.
“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 smooth restorations, especially after load shedding and any prolonged outages,” it said.
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