Africa-Press – South-Africa. City Power is monitoring the flooding that happened in most of the southern and western regions of Johannesburg, and which led to outages that have not yet been fixed.
It’s understood that the City’s Disaster Management has issued a warning, placing teams on high alert following the heavy rains this week.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said they had been in a “disaster mode” since the heavy thunderstorms on Monday.
“Rains [on Friday] have exacerbated the situation making our recovery efforts difficult. We are still dealing with huge backlogs in different parts of the city, with outage calls [on Saturday morning] sitting close to 4 000,” he said.
Half of those calls were over a space of 24 hours, with areas such as Hurthill, Randburg, Roodepoort, Lenasia heavily affected.
“While most of the trees on our infrastructure have been cleared, it is the integrity of the equipment that we are monitoring and attending to,” Mangena said.
“These include the flooded chambers, submerged mini-substations, washed up poles, eroded cables, and cable faults with some popping in the aftermath of the heavy storms.”
Heavy rains on Friday made matters worse in areas such as Lenasia and Roodepoort, where there is flooding currently.
A mini-substation exploded after it got flooded along Peacock Road in Lenasia, leaving residents without power.
“We can only attend to it after the water has subsided,” Mangena said.
“Many others are submerged, some poles and overhead lines are blown. Water also seeped through into the vandalised infrastructure, tripping in some areas.”
He said roads around Klipspruit, Florida, Lenasia and some parts of Roodepoort were also flooded, making it difficult for teams to respond as quickly as they would want to outages.
Mangena said they anticipated that it would take over a week to recover – weather allowing – with most of the problems expected to be dealt with as the storms cleared up.
“Our recovery efforts are also thwarted by load shedding – now sitting at higher stages – which has really taken a huge toll on our infrastructure, resources, and revenue.
“We have pulled in all available resources to deal with backlogs caused by load shedding and storms, and we appeal to our customers for patience and cooperation as we deal with the challenges and ensure minimal interruptions to their power supply.”
City Power said they were working alongside councillors and other authorities in the City and would continue to update residents on developments in their respective areas.
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