The City of Johannesburg (CoJ) has urgently requested State-owned utility Eskom to grant it a reprieve from loadshedding for three days to meet the [nearly insurmountable] challenge of escalating faults and outages following torrential rain in Gauteng.

“Power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts. Accordingly, CoJ mayor Mpho Phalatse, on behalf of City Power, submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from loadshedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.”

By December 12, City Power was still dealing with more than 4 000 service calls related to the outages, with a significant proportion now being multi-day issues, the CoJ said.

Areas hardest hit include the larger Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding on December 9. Operators continue to work tirelessly, and all available technical skills have been deployed, CoJ Environment and Infrastructure Services Department MMC Michael Sun said.

While progress is being made with limited resources in addressing the thousands of outages that have occurred since last week’s inclement weather and flooding, continuous rainfall means more faults are being logged every hour.

“Given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that loadshedding is not only causing to additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and to stabilise the situation,” he added.

“While we are doing our utmost to restore the outages and the city’s councillors are doing their best to assist the residents, thugs see our technicians as easy targets. On December 11, four City Power technicians were held at gunpoint, assaulted and robbed by six men in Jeppestown while in full view of community members standing by.

“Threats and intimidations of technicians are reported daily. We are appealing to all Joburgers to help us to keep our workers safe so we can get through this crisis together,” said Sun.

Further, to vandalise infrastructure, such as minisubstations, to vent the anger of power outages will only delay restoration even longer and put hundreds of other residents in the dark, he added.