City Power on Thursday said Eskom’s ongoing load-shedding was putting a strain on its resources and hampering its ability to timeously attend to faults.
Many of the faults in Johannesburg have been blamed on switching the power system on and off.
“From this morning we have been dealing with many outages, over 2000, in different areas that are as a result of load-shedding,” said City Power Spokesperson Isaac Mangena.
“Most of the localised faults seen during load-shedding are due to vandalism and theft which happens during the downtime when the network is off.”
He said during load-shedding criminals take advantage and tamper with the infrastructure leading to post-load-shedding outages.
“The impact of load-shedding is putting a strain on City Power network and resources, and affect our response to outages and ability to conduct maintenance,” said Mangena.
“The announcement this week by Eskom for the implementation of Stage 2 load-shedding comes as we were still trying to recover from the previous load-shedding, coupled by inclement weather.”
Earlier this week Eskom said it expects Stage 2 load-shedding to continue till Friday.
Mangena said during load-shedding City Power is not able to do planned maintenance “for safety reasons and because of stretched resources”.
He added: “We urge our customers to bear with us as we deal with the backlogs effects of the load-shedding.”
