City Power managers have had to work throughout the weekend so that they “experience the pain” that customers are going through because of load-shedding.
“For this weekend and until all outages are resolved, City Power senior managers have been asked to report for duty, so that we can collectively experience the pain that customers and ward councilors go through when there is no power,” said City Power Spokesperson Isaac Mangena.
“City Power is aware of the impact of these power interruptions on our customers and apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
“In the past 24 hours, City Power experienced a number of power interruptions in the Randburg and Hursthill areas.”
Mangena said the major causes of these outages, include load shedding, cable theft, equipment failure, cable fault, and damage to equipment.
“Load shedding, in particular, has an effect of delaying our ability to repair damaged equipment and to restore power with the necessary speed,” said Mangena.
He said load-shedding causes major damage to electrical equipment because is not designed to be turned on and off.
Mangena said CityPower said it has identified a number of challenges for which we have developed solutions.
“We have noted that in the event of multiple outages which are compounded by load shedding the resources which are allocated to service an area not sufficient,” said Mangena.
In solving this challenge, City Power deployed additional resources from the Planned Maintenance and Test Branch departments, to support Randburg and Hursthill teams.
“We also noted that the information flow, as well as the integrity of information from Regional Service Delivery Centers to the customer center, needs improvement,” said Mangena.
“We will continue to provide two-hourly outage updates through Twitter, Councilor What’s App groups, and the mass media on a 24-hour basis.”
