By Alex Eliseev, Anna Cox and Lee Rondganger
Monday morning's massive power failure has hit businesses, disrupted traffic and left irate residents calling for action.
Sol Mosolo, spokesperson for City Power, said the cause was a problem with the 88kV line that supplied the north-east areas of Johannesburg.
He declined to say where exactly the fault was, or describe in further detail what had gone wrong.
'City Power never appears to have back-up plans in place and this is leading to chaos in the city' "We have sent our technical team out and they are working on repairing the line. We were able to restore a portion of Rosebank with electricity at 5am this morning," Mosolo said, appealing to residents to "bear with us".
Continues Below ↓
Mosolo said all power would hopefully be restored "by the end of the day".
In March this year Brian Hlongwa, the member of the mayoral committee in charge of utilities, vowed to resign if the problem of power outages wasn't resolved.
By March, there had been 775 power cuts in Johannesburg over eight months. Five months later, there are still problems.
Hlongwa also promised that City Power's chief executive, Mogwailane Mohlala, would be fired and other heads would roll as proof of how seriously the city viewed outages.
Hlongwa announced in March that the city was allocating R674-million for the upgrading of infrastructure for the 2005/06 financial year, starting in July.
Mike Moriarty, Johannesburg's Democratic Alliance leader, said it was a "disgrace" that such an outage was allowed to happen and that there were no alternative power feeds available.
"City Power never appears to have back-up plans in place and this is leading to chaos in the city," Moriarty said.
Power outages had reduced extensively compared with last year's figures, Mosolo said.
But Moriarty pointed out that this winter had been mild compared with last year's.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
