By Jonk wa Mashamba
new@alexreporter.co.za
City Power has released a statement in which it apologises for the prolonged unrelated outages caused by yesterday’s rough weather.
On the statement, Isaac Mangena, spokesperson for power utility said the Service Delivery Centre was swamped with high volumes of calls from customers sitting at about 230 by this morning.
“Like the rest of the City, Alexandra supply area has not recovered from the impact of the heavy storms yesterday which uprooted trees falling on our supply lines, minisubstations submerged, and blocked flooded roads making it difficult for our response teams to move in to the affected areas.”
Mangena said the vandalism of “our infrastructure in the township that has been happening overtime is exarcebating the situation, as water easily seeped into most of the opened minisubstation, pole boxes, leading to them failing on contact with rain water”.
He said oome underground cables had been exposed as soil and pavements got eroded.
Affected areas include:
11 th Avenue flats
14 th Avenue between Hofmeyer
13 th and 12 th Avenues
9th Avenue
Riverpark
Zimbabwean/Tsutsumani
Athol
Eltonhill
Glenhazel
Illovo
Kew
Parts of Lyndhurst
Lombardy East and West
Rembrandt Park
“Teams are currently busy at various sites attending to both Low Voltage and Medium Voltage outages.
“While power will be restored gradually to different areas, we expect most to be on by this evening – if the weather gods are on our side and all goes according to plan.
” The teams will work around the clock to ensure full restoration to the affected areas.
“We apologise profusely for the inconvenience caused by this prolonged outage.
“We will continue to update the affected customers on the progress on Cllrs WhatsApp groups as well as on social media @CityPowerJhb,” said Mangena.
“For isolated individual calls and any other electricity related queries customers are advised to log calls on citypower.mobi and 011 490 7484.”