City to intervene in Raslouw and Monavoni electricity outage
Cilliers Brink (MMC Responsible for Region 4) said that she is aware of the frustration caused by the unscheduled rolling power outages in the Raslouw and Monavoni area since December 2017 and for this wishes to apologise to affected residents.
Electricity teams have been working around the clock to attend outages this past week, and will continue to do so until it has been stabilised.
Yesterday Cilliers Brink met with senior electricity officials and their counterparts from the service delivery region, and received a comprehensive technical briefing of the progress made during the weekend, and action steps required going forward.
For a number of months the City has been experiencing faults at the Raslouw substation and its feeder cables. To rectify this and stabilise electricity supply in the area will require capital and operational expenditure which has to be carefully planned.
However they appreciate that the time for planning has now expired, and the City leadership has demanded an action timeline from electricity officials. This will be shared with the community as soon as credible commitment can be made.
In the meantime, the regional service delivery department is to start an intensive overhead line maintenance and tree pruning programme as from Monday, 19 February. This is expected to take five weeks and will include the installation and repair equipment to improve line protection – such as isolators and fuses.
This line maintenance programme will have scheduled interruptions as a result, but these will be communicated to the public and councillors well in advance to reduce any inconvenience.
Sadly, contact cable theft in Raslouw compounds the problem to electricity outages, and to constantly replace cables depletes the maintenance and repairs budget of the service delivery region.
Community Policing Forums [CPF] are crucial in the fight against cable theft, especially in sparsely populated areas. They link community members with the South African Police personnel and resources. While the Raslouw community has a number of community organized formations, it still has no formal CPF. Cilliers Brink have asked councillors in the area to initiate the establishment of such a structure in order to fight the scourge of cable theft together.
During any scheduled outages residents are urged to treat all electrical points as live at all times, and the City wishes to apologise for the inconvenience that might arise as a result of these interruptions.