By Neelam Rahim
01:06:2022

Sunday, through to Tuesday, saw Lenasia suffer long bouts of power outages not linked to power cuts by ESKOM.

Radio Islam spoke to City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena about the causes of the power outages and some activities in Lenasia today.

Isaac explained, “The outages over the last three days were due to different sectors, and they date back to April 2022 where some infrastructure, especially the transmission lines, were vandalised, so we executed planned maintenance on those which was before the Eldorado Park fire incident. It was then delayed by that in terms of restoration and some other issues. We looked closer at the issues that happened on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, and we did not find any cause for the outages that happened. One of the issues that we think caused the trip is the issue of veld fires in the areas between Nirvana and Nancefield substation, including Eldorado Substation.”

City Power announced that it had intensified its cut-off operation to alleviate the pressure on the grid. Today, Mangena spoke about the operation carried out in Extension 11, Lenasia.

“This is part of the other reasons we are having in terms of outages that are happening in the area. We also have a ramped issue of cable theft in the area, leading to other issues like cable fault. For the past two weeks, we have been going to the hotspots of illegal connections to ensure that we clean up these illegal connections; the reason has been that they are the causes of the overloading that happens whenever there is an outage; that occurs.”

“The wires and cables that we remove are mostly aluminium cables. The bare wires that we removed from this operation were also joined by the JMPD; about three hundred and fifty thousand rand worth of those cables were retrieved from this operation. These cables themselves without even mentioning the cost to the area where there are overloading and infrastructure trips. The mini substation where the connection is already vandalised and is on the verge of blowing up, equipment worth half a million rand that we will have to replace every time there is a blow-up,” says Isaac.

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